Arcadia

1

THERE’S BEEN no other birthday chairs in Victor’s life, other than the one that Rook had prepared for him when he was old, other than the one he’d sat upon yet failed to see. Victor was a townie almost through and through. He was not as soily or as leafy as he claimed. He’d fled the countryside when he was three weeks old, when this brusque, gymnastic century was also in its infancy. His dad had died. An epidemic of the sweats had seen him off before his son was born. His home village could barely cope with the sudden glut of widows, dotagers, and orphans, all shaken from their tree before their time, all seeking charity at once. A widower could work and earn his keep. But who would go without to feed and clothe the harness-maker’s wife, or her new baby, when it came? Her husband’s skills had died with him. He had left no land or crops for her to sell. The workshop cottage and its yard was only theirs by rent. The landlord’s agent let her stay until the child was born, and then — what choice had he? — he asked for payment for the weeks she’d missed. The money that she’d made from selling unworked leather, harness tools, her husband’s horse, was not enough to clear the months of debt, and live. The mother and her wrinkled kid were as cold and poor as worms.

At least Victor’s tiny gut was full. His mother’s breasts were independent of all the hardship in their lives. But she was weak from loss of blood and milk and lack of food. The best she had for meals was half a block of pigeon’s cheese and two jumps at the larder door.

What of the free food of the countryside? The mushrooms and the nuts? The stubble grain left over by the thresher and the harvesters? The berries and the birds? The honey and the fish? Life’s not like that, except in children’s books. The free food of the countryside is high and maggoty before it’s ripe; or else it’s faster than the human hand and can’t be caught. What’s free and good is taken by the bully dogs and birds. What’s left is sustenance for flies and mice.

So Victor’s mother had no choice but to pack a canvas bag — a bag her husband stitched for her before they wed — and set off with her baby to the town. She had a distant, younger sister there, a maid to some rich man. Her address was poste restante at the Postal Hall. Victor’s mother asked the landlord’s agent to write a note. It said, ‘Sister, my husband’s dead, and less than twenty-three years old. I have a child. His name is Victor. So we must come to you as you are all we have, and will be with you soon for love and help. Today is Monday and the 26th of June. God keep you well. Signed lovingly, your only Em.’ She begged a postage stamp and left the letter with the village clerk. There was a mail train every other day. The letter would soon be in the town. Her sister would prepare to take the widow and the orphan in, for sure, and find them food and work.

Em made a sling for Victor and strapped him to her chest with her shawl. She tied the canvas bag across her back. She threw some grains of maize — for Thanks and Fare-thee-well — on the doorstep of her house. She lit a candle. She ought to carry light from their old home into their new, wherever that might be. Light is luck. You take it with you when you move. She lifted it and put it down again. Once. Twice. The flame drew back. It ducked and shrank. The light would have to stay. She was not fool enough to think she’d keep the flame alive out in the wind and night.

‘We’ll leave it here for him,’ she told her son. ‘Your father always loved the mummery of candle flames.’ But Victor cried when he lost the sight of that low flame. It was his first and only toy. He wanted it. Em knelt and snubbed it then, with fingers moistened by her tongue. She let him grip the candle end, a nipple and a finger made of wax. It kept him quiet as they set off on their journey to the town, through valleys made patchy-blue that time of year by fields of manac beans. The sky and countryside were fabric from one cloth, and that the colour of the Caribbean Sea.

The baby Victor was content with little more than suck and blow. He was happy just to hold the candle end, to sleep or feed, made biddable by the rhythm of his mother’s steps, kept warm and coddled by the sling and by her breasts. A child of three weeks old is built to bend and bounce and sleep throughout. And just as well, because his mother’s hike to town took seven days and passed through storms and woods and fords which would frighten and dismay children of a greater age. Em feared wolves and chills and broken legs, but Victor filled his empty head with heartbeats from his mother’s chest. She washed his soiled and heavy swaddle cloths in streams and let the wet clothes dry and stiffen, draped across her back. By the time they reached the outposts of the civic world, the cemeteries, the rubbish dumps, the gypsy camps, the homes of bankers, the abattoirs, the outer boulevards of town, Victor had regained his birthweight. His mother, on the other hand, was paler, thinner, colder than a cavern eel.

They left the fields behind. They reached metalled roads, and rows of houses with lawns and carriage drives. They came through high woods and found a measured townscape spreading out in greys and reds and browns, with a shimmering mirage of smoke which made it seem as if the hills beyond were chimney products of the city mills and that the sky was spread with liquid slate. This was a different city from the one we know. Less egoistic, more malign.

Em carried Victor down the causeway of trees and grass which split the city’s outer boulevard in two, and conducted trams and countryside into the town. These were the days when foot and hoof and wheel were battling for the government of towns, and wheels — because the rich had motor cars — were winning every skirmish on the streets. For peace and quiet the walkers shared the causeway with the trams.

She asked an old man for the Postal Hall. ‘It’s far, you’ll have to take a tram,’ he said, pointing to the tallest part of town. He showed her where the tram would stop and waited while she joined the queue. But, once he’d turned away to dodge a path between the vans and carriages which thronged the road, she set off once again by foot along the tramway into the city’s heart. She feared the other passengers. She feared the clanking trams with their winding, outside stairs, and their wind-blown upper platforms which shook and muttered like the devil’s haycart. She trembled in the street. Yet surely these were women just like her, beneath their feathers and their ribbons, beneath their hobble skirts. What had she expected? That city people got about on hands and knees, as country wisdom claimed? She looked her urban sisters in the face, but could not find an eye to match her own. They seemed like modest girls — or sinful ones — who could not lift their eyes, who did not have the energy to smile. Em walked and smiled and sought a welcome from everyone she passed. How could she know how strange she seemed, how disconcerting was her upturned face and mouth? She kissed her Victor on the head. She nuzzle-whispered in his ear the chorus of the nursery rhyme: ‘Townies, frownies, fancy gownies; noses up is; mouthies down is.’

The Postal Hall was not what she had thought. In her world halls were empty spaces defended against the weather and the night by bricks and tiles, and only full for meetings and for feasts. She’d thought the Postal Hall would be a covered clearing in the town. Her sister, unchanged from the young girl who’d emigrated there three years before, would be waiting at the door. Or else, Em thought, she’d simply give the number of the poste restante. Someone would press a bell or make a call to summon her sister from her work. If it was simple to find folk in country towns, then think how easy it would be in cities such as this where everything was done so quickly and so well. Instead she found a sandstone building with many flights of steps, and far too many doors. Her access was blocked by carts and trams. Opposing streams of people competed for the pavement and the road. Never had she witnessed so much speed, heard such urgency or encountered such confidence and hesitation all at once. Never had she seen so many horses: so at ease and so fulfilled, despite the brassy onslaught of the motor cars.

Em crossed with Victor in the wake of two fat men in uniforms. She chose the central entrance to the Postal Hall, and went inside, through giant columns and great bronzed doors. At once, she took her hat from off her hair and held it in her hand. She almost crossed herself and fell down on her knees to pray. Here was a bloated, oblong hall, sepulchral and forbidding. What light there was came through high windows in a dome and from gas chandeliers which hissed like nuns, and were reflected in the polished veiny marbles of the floor. There were a dozen mahogany counters and a score of metal grilles and at each one a jostling queue. All the men and women there had forms or money or parcels or letters in their hands and, even though they whispered as in church, the hubbub of the place was louder, deader than the street. No one seemed to see her there. Their arms banged into hers. She held the paper out with her sister’s number, but no one stopped to help. She called her sister’s name. Her raised voice upset Victor, who had mostly slept despite the city. He pushed his chin against his mother’s breasts, vexed by something. Wind, perhaps, or by the taste of desperation in his mother’s milk. She pushed him to the nipple once again, but he only bit it with his gums, and cried like old men cry, his face a contour map of lines, his eyes squeezed tight. Again she called her sister’s name. But no one came except a post commissionaire, who pointed to his badge and then the door and said that she should leave or ‘cut the noise’.

She joined a queue behind a line of people, most of whom had envelopes or cards. They moved away from her, her homelessness, her baby’s noise, the smell of urine drying on her clothes-line back.

‘Is this the place?’ she asked, and held her sister’s number up. They saw the two words, poste restante, and pointed to an anteroom. Inside were ranks of metal boxes, each with slits and locks, another counter and another queue. When her chance came, Em held her sister’s name and number up against the grille. The woman at the counter glanced at it and disappeared into a closed, back room without a word of greeting. She returned a moment later with a letter. It was the one which Em had sent — thanks to the borrowed literacy of the landlord’s agent — two weeks before. The clerk said, That’s all there is,’ and ‘Identification, if you please.’

Em was confused. She said, ‘My sister, is she here?’ She gave her sister’s name again. She held a conversation that made no sense and made the people in the queue short-tempered and amused. The counter clerk put her sister’s letter to one side. ‘I can’t help,’ she said. Already she was serving someone else.

Outside again, Em could not find a place to rest and contemplate. So this is my life now, she thought. I’m all the Bs — bitched, buggered, and bewildered — and far from home! At least young Victor was asleep again. His mother rolled the end of candle in her hand.

Em walked aimlessly while there was light. She hoped to see her sister on the street. On that first night they slept in stables near the railway yard, but in the morning dogs had sniffed them out and frightened Victor with their barks. Again she walked the streets and looked in all the faces passing by. If she saw women of her sister’s age who looked like maids, she stopped them, mentioning her sister’s name and asking them for help, advice, or work.

‘You’ll not get work with that,’ one woman said, pointing at the top of Victor’s nuzzling head. ‘What is it? Boy or girl? There’s people in this town who’d pay good money for a kid like that. I can find you someone who will give this kid a proper life.’ She held Em’s arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to a place where you can eat and sleep.’ Em had to shout and struggle to get free.

That second night they slept as best they could on sheltered benches at the tramway terminus. The lights were harsh and there was noise from work-gangs cleaning trams. The yardman said she’d have to move, but when he saw the child he let her stay. ‘For just one night,’ he warned. ‘And then you’d better take the baby back to where your people are. A little dot like that won’t last five minutes sleeping rough.’ Em said she had a sister who would help. She told the man her sister’s name and what had happened at the Postal Hall. He shook his head. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Your sister’s just one tiny country bean, buried deep down in the sack. You won’t find her by sticking in your hand and pulling ten beans out. This city’s big. You’ve seen the crowds. Your sister, she’s as good as dead unless you’ve got the address of a house.’

Later, he came back. She woke to find him watching her. He had some cold fish and some bread.

‘You’re quite a pretty girl,’ he said, looking more at Victor and Em’s breasts than at her face. ‘You’d better find some man to take you in. You’d better find a proper father for the child.’

Em shook her head and said she didn’t want the bread or fish. She had no appetite. She feared the yardman wanted something in exchange for food. His eyes were flared and restless like a pig in heat. He looked — to use her mother’s phrase — as if his heart had slipped below his belt. She closed her eyes and pulled her shawl across her chest. At last she heard the yardman walk away. He had not left the bread or fish behind.

Now, her third day on the streets, she did her best to keep her problems to herself. She did not try to match the gazes of the men and women in her path. She did not seek — or trust — their kindness any more. She sat with Victor in the sun on the steps of the Postal Hall. She’d tried the clerks in poste restante. This time a man behind the grille had asked for proof of who she was before he’d check the number that she gave. He had looked at her and Victor as if they both were pigeons of disease. She could not stop the tears. She could not stop them running down her cheeks onto her shawl even when she’d fled the Postal Hall and rested in the sun. What should she do? Seek out the yardman? Sell Victor for the highest sum? Head out of town and find her husband’s village once again, beyond the sea-blue fields? Perhaps she ought to step beneath a tram. Or try her luck beneath the hooves and wheels of some fast cart. She was too tough to take these easy routes. In those days life was hard. All life was hard. They raised you then on work, debt, hunger, cold. Three days and nights without a bed in town was better than the seven they had spent walking through the fields and woods. So things were looking up and would improve each day.

She nursed the dream of meeting with her sister once again, but set her daily target low. The first task was to find a place of safety. Then to find a place where they might sleep without fear of men or thieves. And, then, a little food perhaps. A good crisp apple, sweet with sun, was what she most desired. This was the country treat for little girls with tears or for children who’d been good. ‘Cheer up, dear Em,’ her mother used to say. ‘Go on. Go to the shed and get yourself a nice ripe apple from the tub.’ Em smiled at this — the memories of her mother and of treats. It must have been the smile and the charm and snugness of Victor at her breast that caused the two women passing by to pause and match her smile with theirs. They threw a few small coins into Em’s spread lap, and smiled again, and walked away. They looked like sisters, plump, modest girls, with shallow caps pinned to their hair and shoes with little heels. The baskets that they carried — the country market kind, woven out of teased bark — were empty. They looked like rich men’s maids, like country girls who’d made their lives in town. Em followed them. It seemed the wisest thing to do. They led her through narrowing streets, past mews, and squints and alleyways, beneath the medieval wooden gates, into the merriment of the Soap Market where they — and Em herself — were soon lost in the crowd. If her sister was a maid to some rich man, then surely she would buy her victuals there, thought Em. Besides, she felt at ease and safe amongst the country products and the smells. What could be more innocent than shopping in the marketplace for food? Ten, twenty times, she thought she saw the plump sisters once again. But all the women looked alike. They seemed to dress the same, and walk in pairs. These were the type of women, as Em had discovered, who would give coins freely for a widow with a child on milk. She knew that this was where her fortune would be made.

That night she joined the others without homes, scavenging for fruit and coins amongst the mats and panniers of the market. She sucked the laxative and discarded fangs of rhubarb stems. She dined on dates and green tomatoes, while Victor made supper out of milk. She knew what she would have to do. At dawn she woke, wet with Victor’s urine, and disturbed by cold and the noise of porters, barrows, market girls. She turned her palm up for sympathy and cash. A market trader, fond of children, placed a perfect apple in her palm.

So Victor lived beneath a market parasol for eight, nine months. His mother found it thrown out. Some flower-trader, at a guess, had given up on it and bought another. Its wooden pole had snapped in two. Its green and yellow canvas canopy was torn. She made repairs as best she could without materials or tools. She made the most of nothing. Women had to then. A bit of canvas and a broken pole were better quarters than the trenches that their men would occupy when war broke out. Em set up her umbrella at the centre of the marketplace, between two bars and near the scrubbing stones. There was the flat, damp trunk of a snag tree for back support. There was market waste and mulch to soften cobblestones. Her begging pitch was chosen well. The drunks, the madwomen, the wretched ones, the innocents with visions, the dregs and cynics, assembled at the steps of churches, and begged for coins, alms, for holy charity, from worshippers, and penitents, and wedding guests. The ones with whistles, tricks with fire or balls stayed on the busy streets and entertained the hangers-out, the tramline queues, the cafe clientele for cash. Em’s kind of beggar, the kind that is the model of what could happen to us all, must be clean — and in the Soap Garden there was running water all day long. Crowds of people, too, with time to spare. The traffic there was mixed: market traders, bar girls, their customers, the women and their washing, the men who came to drink and talk. No one came there without a little cash. The bars, the girls, the market stalls weren’t charities. Gratitude was not the bargain that they sought.

So Victor’s mother did more than beg. She traded smiles and peace of mind. She did it well. She had a baby to support. The coloured, broken umbrella was the perfect touch. It was what country women used to shield themselves from the rain and sun when they came in to town to sell their flowers or their garlic cloves. Passers-by would look down to see what this woman had for sale. Em’s face was hidden by the parasol. Her breasts were on display — with Victor hard at work. The child in need. One hand — the one with a single wedding ring — was resting on her knee palm up. The other pressed the baby to her chest. She marketed herself. She felt no shame. Shame is a family, village thing. It doesn’t count for much amongst strangers. Her only fear — and hope — was that her sister would chance by and look beneath the parasol. She did her best to beg with pride. It was not sin, like drink or bed, that had brought her there. She pinned a browning photograph of her husband to the canvas of the parasol with a black silk funeral rosette. It signified, Here is a widow and her child. Look at their man. His death has made them homeless, poor.

What of Victor at this time? Are kids of less than five weeks old so self-engrossed and innocent that nothing in the outside world makes any impact on their lives so long as they are fed and warm and free from wind? The truth is, yes. The only bonding that there is takes place between the nipples and the lips. Victor was the kind of child who bonded to his mother’s breast with the tenacity and deliberation of a limpet on a stone. If he was sucking, he was well. Detach his gums, prise him loose with the gentlest finger, and he would imitate a seagull bickering for shrimps, his tiny call — not yet a voice — as querulous and fretful as a dirge.

Em thought this threnody would earn her cash, that Victor singing thinly for the breast would move the hardest passer-by to find a few spare coins. If her child could cry like that so readily she only had to pop her nipples free when people passed and she would earn a fortune in small change. No one was mean enough, she thought, to close their ears to babies in distress. But she was wrong. We in this city are the sentimental sort. We don’t like tragedy. That’s why the drunkard at the railway station gates, singing bits of opera in fake Italian and French, and bothering the women with his arias, earned more from begging than the trolley man who’d lost a wife, his mind, and both his legs in some forgotten war. To toss some coins in the drunk’s old opera hat was to show one’s liberality, one’s worldliness, one’s sense that all was well. To give cash to the trolley man — taken without a word or smile — was to price a life, a leg, a personality. At what? At less than one could spare. The coins clattered on the trolley floor. Enough small change to buy a rind of pork, a two-stop tramway ride, a piece of ribbon for your hair. The coins paid for guilt-free entry to the forecourt and the trains. Except, of course, the gateway where the trolley man lay in wait was the one least used. His naked stumps, his naked hopelessness, made people change their routes. The operatic drunkard got the crowd.

So it was with Em. When she took Victor off the breast, his protests cleared a space around their parasol. The shoppers did not look to see what was for sale. They knew. They heard the baby’s screams and kept their eyes away from this private tableau of distress. It would not do to stare. Or smile. Or break the moment with some coins in Em’s palm. Besides, what could a coin do for one so young? A coin would not change its life. What should they do then? Search their pockets for a little solid love? Hold out their hands and offer to this pair that spare room, rent-free? That job? That meal? That ticket home? No, Victor’s tears — and, here, who will not pause to note the leaden candour of the words? — were of no worth. But what could be more appealing than a baby on its mother’s nipple, the two most loved of natural shapes, the infant cheek, the breast? No need to look away from nakedness like that. You could study scenes more intimate in churches or in galleries. Madonna and her Child. The Infancy of Christ. First Born. Indeed, there was a sculpture reproduced on the lower-value silver coins of that time. A woman, Concord, held an infant to her breast, her tunic open to her waist, her thighs becoming tree trunk, tree bole, the tree becoming undergrowth, becoming Motherland. Here, then, was the sentimental counterpart of comic, operatic drunks. Em and Victor made a wholesome sight when Victor was asleep and on her breast. Coins dropped into the mother’s palm or on her shawl were tribute tithes for family life. Em understood. To earn the pity and the cash of citizens she had to seem respectable and, more than that, serene — a living sculpture labelled Motherhood.

2

FOR THOSE MEN who were not moved by Motherhood, Em acted Eve. She wore a mask of gormless innocence which was as challenging to them as the pouting and the paint upon the faces of the bar girls who sold real sex for cash. The market traders who passed her frequently and saw the way her expression seemed to fluctuate haphazardly between Eve and Motherhood thought — preferred to think, in fact — that Em was none too bright. They said she hadn’t got the sense that God gave lettuce. They labelled her ‘the Radish’. That was the nickname that they used for girls red-faced and odorous and from-the-soil like her. These traders had good cause to doubt the sharpness of her intellect, besides the permutations of her face. She muttered to her baby all day long, and in those slow and well-baked country tones which stretched the vowels and squashed the consonants and made the language sound like morse. Yet there was cunning just below the widow’s skin. Alms-givers welcome gormless gratitude. They do not give to people who seem wiser than themselves, no matter whether it be Eve or not. No, Victor’s mother was no fool, despite appearances. A fool would have an empty palm, but Em’s was always slightly curled and buttoned heavily with the copper brown of coinage.

Her looks, of course, were helpful there. She was a radish with a round and childish face. Her breasts were high and firm with milk. Her throat and shoulders were vulnerable and bare. Her knees were spread to make her lap a cradle for the child. Her feet and lower legs protruded from her apron skirts with the unselfconsciousness of a small girl sitting in shadow at the harvest edge. Any man who paused to drop some coins in her palm had paid for time to stare at her — though if he stepped too close the parasol would block his view. She did not lift her face to look these men directly in the eye. A look from her would make them hesitate, or return the coins they had found for her in the pockets of their coats. For women, though, the radish turned its chin and caught their eyes and smiled. Most shopping women are too timid and too sociable to fail to match a freely given smile. And having smiled themselves at Em, what could they do? What else but mutter phrases about the weather or the child, and buy escape from smiles and platitudes with coins in Em’s palm?

Sometimes the crowds which walked between the market and the garden were too dense for smiles to work. The shoppers simply dropped their eyes and let the beggar woman’s beams slip by. But Em soon learnt the trick of targeting her smiles with words. ‘God Bless the Cheerful Giver,’ she would say. Or, ‘Lady, Lady!’ spoken urgently, as if she’d spotted danger on the street or recognized a family friend. If Em could only stop the first one in a crowd and embarrass her to pause and give, then she could count on gifts in streams. The first fish leads the shoal.

So Victor and his mother lived beneath the parasol by day, and slept at night wherever they could find a place amongst the dozing market baskets or at the back of bars. They were not rich. Of course they were not rich. How could they be on gleanings? But they survived, sustained by charity, by the prospect of Em’s sister chancing by, by the certainty that the city would provide abundantly, by the sense of awe they felt at being at the centre of such a boisterous web, by the dislocated optimism of those whose lives are trembling at the gate.

Was Victor happy? So far, yes. He fed contentedly. He slept. His domain was his mother’s lap. Her nipples were his toys. But then the muscles strengthened in his neck and arms. He grew bored with suckling. He wanted to lift his head to look around at all the movement and the colours in the streets. He fell back startled from the breast when he heard Em calling out, ‘Lady, Lady!’ or when the hubbub of the crowd seemed more eloquent and urgent than the beating of his mother’s heart. He found he liked those moments best when he was upright on his mother’s knee and she was belching him, separating the suckling oxygen from the milk that he had swallowed and which was causing jousting mayhem in his gut. She had one hand flat on his chest, supporting him. The other tapped and played a gentle bongo on his back between his fragile shoulderblades. Or else she beat her tune, not with her fingers on his back, but with the cracked and greying candle stub which she would only light again when she had somewhere to call home. Her son’s short neck was creased in tidal ripples of baby fat. His mouth was hanging open, waiting for the upward storm of warm and milky wind. Some passing men made clicking noises with their tongues for him, or comic, pouting kisses with their lips. Sometimes a dog ran by. Or older children. Always the market offered entertainment to the child — a porter with teetering crates of onions on his wooden cart, an argument, a snatch of song, some shoving between friends, and, almost constantly by day, the casual, tangled flow and counter-flow of citizens in search of romance, fortune, pleasure, food. At times the street around the parasol was quiet and empty, but then Victor found a butterfly to watch or sharp-edged sunlight winking on a broken neck of glass or the flexing toes of his own feet, or spilt water — parting, joining in its halting, bulbous progress through the cobblestones.

Once he’d belched he would have stayed most happily, his head laid back upon Em’s chest, his hands encased in hers, a dozing spectator. But there was money to be earned. His mother’s breasts were Victor’s lathe, his workbench, the family spinning wheel. Em put her small son to her breasts. She put his mouth onto her nipple and she held him there, whispering and pigeoning into his ear to make him calm. It was a hopeless task. A growing child will not stay calm and supine all day long. A child is put upon this earth to raise its head and stretch its legs and grab. Em sang him lullabies. She told him country tales. She reminisced about her husband, Victor’s dad. But Victor did not care. The docile, suckling infant grew less tractable. His stomach became distended and would not clear with belches. His testicles and inner thighs became encrusted with a bitter rash, its scaling plaques and lesions made angrier by the baby’s water and his stools. He cried when he was wrapped inside his swaddle clothes. He thrashed his legs and pushed his fists into himself.

Em knew what should be done. A nappy rash is not the plague. It only takes a little air, some white of egg, and patience for the rash to clear. She begged an egg and broke it into the half-skin of a discarded orange. She put tiny poultices of orange pith, glistening with albumen, onto her son’s sore thighs and testicles. She stretched his legs and let him lie, naked from the waist down, across her lap. The sun and breeze were free to sink and curl between his legs. Young Victor — his flaming gonads patched in orange pith — looked as if the madders and the ochres of a peeling fresco had settled in his lap. So much for Eve and Motherhood. This sculpture was not good for trade. Em’s outstretched hand was hardly troubled by the weight of coins now. Nobody caught her eye. The squeamish men no longer paid to stare at Victor on Em’s breast.

The remedy was simpler than eggs. The problem was that Em was eating too much fruit. Her diet was the oranges, the grapes, the grapefruit, the tomatoes, and the apples that the more familiar shoppers and traders tossed to her as they passed by. She dined on that. Then for supper she fed herself on what she gleaned amongst the cobbles, the fruit discarded, bruised, mislaid in the Soap Market. She fed herself on citrus, pectins, fructose. Her waters were as tart and acid as peat dew. Her milk was too. It passed through Victor acrimoniously. It turned his gut. It chafed and scalded his most tender skin. Feeding made him restless on his mother’s breast. He tugged her nipples in his gums. He tried to bite. And then Em had a problem of her own. Her son had made one nipple sore. The nipple cracked, and was not helped to heal by all the acid in her milk. She would not let her child feed on that side. She only let him suck milk from the right. But he was bigger now and wanted more. One breast was not enough. He’d passed six months. His mouth and stomach were prepared for solid food — some mashed banana mixed with milk, some peas, potatoes, stewed apple, grain. But Em was frightened of the day when Victor would renounce the breast. She liked the way he clung to her to feed. She simply pushed her child onto her one good breast and hoped his rash, her crack, would heal before the cash dried up.

Em’s fruity undernourishment and her fatigue at coping with the child alone reduced her flow of milk still more. Again the baby lost all interest in the outside world. He sucked all day, but still he was not satisfied. He was tired and fretful now, at night. He would not sleep for long. He whimpered and he dozed. His mother’s breasts were irritants to him. She would not let him suck the one; the other one was nearly dry. Em was in pain. Her cracked nipple had become infected through neglect. She was feverish. A nut-sized abscess had formed amongst the milk ducts of her breast. It blushed and throbbed. The pain was memorable.

‘I’m out of oil,’ she told herself, picking at the peeling fossil slates which were her nails.

Together Em and Victor rocked away the nights and days. Em’s careful presentation of her baby and herself was neglected. The radish face turned yellow-white. The good health of the countryside did not survive the hardness of the town. She had no plan to make a fresh escape. She sank into the shade beneath the parasol and called out above the fretful cries of Victor, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying.’ She wept. She tried to seize the trouser legs, the skirts of passers-by. She mimed an empty stomach. She put her hand onto her heart. She tried abuse. She called out words she had not known before she came to town.

It did not work. The rich were blind to noisy poverty. The people hurried by. The crazy woman with the parasol would win no hearts like that. She had trembled at the gate. Now the gate was closing on them both. The city was about to lock them in a cell of hunger, sickness and despair. And then their fortunes changed. Em’s sister, Victor’s aunt, was sent by chance to rescue them.

3

SHE WAS NO rich man’s maid. She was a beggar, just like Em. And worse. The aunt had lost the kitchen job for which she’d come to town three years before. She’d not excelled at the skivvying which — when her widowed father died — the Village Bench had hoped would ‘quieten’ her. High hopes indeed for such a squally girl. Her face, and tongue, had not found favour with her employer’s cook, who had taken her teenage dreaminess, her wilful tawny hair, her lack of tact, her pockmarked forehead and cheeks, as insolence.

The hope had been that Aunt could — quickly, cheaply — be transformed from hayseed into scullion. But she was not the curtsy-kowtow kind and had no kitchen skills. ‘She couldn’t boil up water for a barber,’ cook had said. ‘That girl’s as much use in this kitchen as a cat.’ Instead, she was the sort who saw the city as a place for play not work. Unlike the country working day the city day was ruled by clocks. It had its shifts for work and meals and sleep. And there were shifts when Aunt was free to play. What did she care if cook found single, errant, tawny hairs entwined in dough or curling like a filamentary eel in ‘madam’s’ soup? Why all the fuss? Nobody had died from swallowing one hair. And what if there were egg bogeys between the tines of breakfast forks? Or if the skillet smelled of pork? So much the better if the skillet smelled of pork! Anyone with sense or appetite would take a fold of bread and ‘wipe the pig’s behind’. She and her older, married sister, Em, fought for such a treat when they were young.

Aunt simply could not understand the odd proprieties, the niceties, of bourgeois city life where more was wasted than consumed, where laughter, yawns, and stomach wind shared equal status, swallowed, hidden, stifled by a hand. She did not like ‘indoors’. But she adored the bustle and the badinage of streets, the intimacy of crowds, the hats, the clothes, the trams, the liberty. She had it to herself once in a while — when she was sent by cook to purchase extra eggs or vegetables, when every second Saturday she had a half-day off, when — once, at night — she climbed the backyard wall and walked till dawn in those parts of the city where lamps — and spirits — were rarely dimmed. On that occasion Aunt was met by her employer’s dogs when she returned. They took her for a thief and, though they knew her well enough from all the times she’d favoured them with kitchen slops, they were too dumb or mischievous to let her clamber back into the kitchen yard. Their barking called the Master and the police. For cook this was the final straw. She did not find it likely that the girl had just been ‘walking’ as she claimed.

‘You country girls are all the same,’ she said. ‘“Bumpkins do not good burghers make.”’ She did not say what she had told her employers, that Aunt was mad, ‘a leaking pot’. She paid Aunt off with the exact train fare — oneway — to the village of her birth, only fifteen months after she had fled it for the prospects of the town. Aunt spent the train fare on a hat.

She skipped around the bars and restaurants quite happily. She wore her hat — a high-crowned, deep-brimmed cloche in straw with dog-rose sprigs in felt. It was the fashion for that year amongst young women of a cheerful disposition. It masked the pockmarks on her forehead and made her seem more winsome than she was. She doffed her hat at groups of men who sat on the patios of bars or on the terraces of restaurants. They seemed so bored and so keen to be amused. She only had to smile or comic-curtsy or spin her hat around upon her open hand, to earn a little cash. It was so easy to take money or a meal off men and still stay good.

There were a dozen country girls like her who worked the same neighbourhood of the city and who shared a two-room attic in a tenement near the Soap Market, in the Woodgate district. The Princesses they were called, sardonically, by the poor families and the labourers who inhabited the lower floors. They’d all lost jobs as maids or kitchen girls and had finished on the streets. Some stole. Some sold themselves to men. Some earned a little from the sale of matches or doing fetch-and-carry for the posh, frail ladies who took strong waters in the smart salons. Aunt stuck to begging. She was good at it. And soon she had enough each day to pay the pittance rent for a small corner in the Princesses’ attic rooms. There was no proper light or water there, or any stove for cooking. But there was camaraderie and candles. We know that poverty’s not fun, but if you are young and poor in company then shame, and lack of hope, and loneliness do not increase the burdens on your back. Sharing nothing or not much is easier than sharing wealth.

So Aunt was happy with her life. There was no washing up. No slops. No punctilious, grumpy cook. No silver breakfast forks. They shared — like only women will — their daily gains, their city spoils, their swag. The only privacy they had — if, say, they wished to sit unnoticed on the pot — was to hide behind the lines of washing, strung across the rooms, or to wait for darkness. But why hide away to pee, when peeing in full view of all your friends can cause such mirth and raucous joviality? ‘Hats off,’ they used to say to Aunt, whose cloche would rarely leave her head. ‘It’s impolite to pee like that in the presence of Princesses.’ They’d wait until they heard the spurt of urine in the bowl and then they’d say, ‘Hats off. Stand up … and take a bow!’ Or ‘Sing, sing! And show your ring.’ The communal laughter of these Princesses was laughter with no victim and no spite.

Aunt learnt the tricks of begging from their attic talk at night, as each described the day they’d had; how men’s brains were unfastened with their braces; how careless waiters were with tips; which restaurant chefs would give a back-step meal to any girl who’d volunteer to mop the floor. You’d eat the meal — then run; what places were the worst and best for palming cash from strangers. She learnt how just a dab of zinc and vinegar could make a girl look feverish. It didn’t work with men, but women — older ones — would pay to make you go away. She learnt a gallery of beggars’ faces, how to slide her tongue between her teeth and lips to look the simpleton, how to fake the single floating eye of the insane, how picking noses is just as good as picking pockets for getting cash if it is done on restaurant terraces and in a childish, not a vulgar way.

So she did well on city streets. She begged and importuned enough to count herself — by country standards — well set up. She was much plumper than the girl who’d skivvied in the kitchen. She had her hat as talisman and her Princesses for family. She did not think about the coming day — or much about the day just passed. She liked to place her hat upon her head and wander streets as if they were country lanes and she was simply searching for free fruit. She never tired of putting out her hand or challenging — this was her favourite trick — the drinking men in bars to toss and land a coin in the canyon brim of her straw hat.

Despite the drama of the hat, she was an ill-built, scruffy girl. The pits and craters on her face were blessings in disguise. They kept the men at bay. She did not have her sister’s looks. But what she had was something better, rarer in those days than mere good looks. She had a sense of unembarrassed self-esteem. She liked the way she was. So when she heard her sister calling from beneath her green and yellow parasol, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying,’ Aunt was not the least put out. She’d heard a hundred stories of the saddest kind of why and how her Princesses had fallen on hard times. Tough tales that made her wonder how animals, as frail as adolescents are, could surface with such buoyancy from depths so cold and bitter. She guessed that there was death in Em’s own tale or illness or the loss of work. She was not shockable. It seemed to fit, not flout, the patterns of the world that Em, like her, should end up in this place. Fate — the fate of being born a country woman in those days — was not Coincidence, nor was it Chance. The poor take trams. They travel on fixed lines. It’s only the rich that go at will in carriages.

Aunt stooped below the parasol and matched her sister with the voice she’d heard. They were the same, except that Em was poorer, thinner than a head of corn that had been stripped of ears. Aunt knew — from just one glance — that her sister was forlorn and ill and underfed. She heard the whimpers of the child. Her niece or nephew, she presumed. She felt content to have a sister once again, to be an aunt. She knew that she could help.

So Em became the oldest of the Princesses — and Victor was their little Prince. Most of the girls were glad to have a child at first. They passed him to and fro and petted him as if he were a cat. They teased him with their little fingers in his mouth and marvelled at the power of his gums and lips. They loved to belch him on their knees, his fingers wrapped so bonelessly round theirs, or to press their noses to his head and smell the honey-must of cradle cap. They kissed the baby dimples on his arms, his back, his chin, and called him ‘Little rogue’ and sang ‘Dimple in chin, Devil within’. They made noises like you hear in zoos from those determined that the parakeets should talk. But Victor was in no mood for games. You see, already he was malcontent, and not because of his acid rash alone. He wanted food. Warm lips and murmurs do not serve supper. He tried to push his hand between the buttons of their dresses. He wet and creased the fabric of their blouses with his mouth.

‘They’re all the same,’ a Princess said. ‘Men only want one thing.’

Aunt found some floorboard for Em and Victor below the sloping attic roof. She scrounged a little matting and some cloth for blankets. Aunt carried Victor to the street, and within twenty minutes had returned with a topless conserve jar containing tepid mashed potato, manac beans and gravy which she had begged at a restaurant’s back door.

‘This kid’s a gold mine.’ She crushed the beans and made a mixture with the potatoes and gravy. ‘There’s plenty here for all of us,’ she said, though softly so that ‘all of us’ meant Victor, Aunt and Em. She made stewballs in her palms, four large ones the size and shape of eggs, and smaller pellets for her nephew, Victor. His first solid meal. He was almost nine months old. His first milk teeth were winking through the gum.

Together they poked the food into his mouth. It was too dry for him. He coughed. And when he closed his mouth the food was squeezed between his lips and fell into his mother’s hand. He did not cry, though. This was not distress. He simply did not have the knack of swallowing such lumps. Perseverance won the day. The sisters had a score of fingers to keep the food inside the baby’s mouth. Fingertips are like enough to nipples for Victor to be confused and suck. The sucking did the trick. For every scrap that slithered out across his chin a small amount went down his throat. His sucking dragged the gravy from the mixture. He liked the smell and salt. He had his fill. He slept — for once — without his mother’s breast.

Em told her story of how she’d come to town, and how the town had almost beaten her. Then Aunt replied with hers, and how the town was better than a friend. It took more care of waifs and strays than any village in the land. ‘If that weren’t so,’ she said, ‘the countryside would be the place for girls like us. The trees and fields would overflow with widows and orphans. But look around you, Em. Look on the streets. It’s cities take us in.’ And then she added, ‘City air makes free.’

They talked like artisans at lunch, about the problems of the begging trade. Their jobs were like all jobs. Why should they be abject? They had their colleagues, rivals, clientele. They had their working rituals, too — and the pride and purpose that such employment brings. The problem was that Em’s breasts were nearly dry, and still too sore for comfort. Giving solid food to Victor might give them time to heal — but would the child return to the breast when he and Em were begging once again?

‘When Victor isn’t feeding,’ Em explained, ‘I don’t make money on the streets.’

‘If that’s the only problem you’ve got, then you’re the lucky one!’ said Aunt. She took her sister by the hand. ‘Just sleep,’ she said. ‘I told you, Victor’s gold to us. A baby at the breast earns cash. You don’t need milk for that. You don’t need spit to stick your tongue inside your boyfriend’s ear.’

At dawn, while Em and Victor were still asleep, Aunt put on her hat and went down to the bars where the traders, warehousemen, and porters had coffee-and-a-shot before they started work. She found the comic angle for her hat. She wore her sweetest, daftest smile. She stood against the walls of bars and called for pitch-and-toss. She’d show the men her plump and mottled knees if anyone could throw a coin in her hat. The man who stepped up to her and softly dropped a coin in, imagined he had got the best of Aunt. She showed her knees. He departed poorer than he’d come, but she, quite soon, had earned enough for food. She bought a bruised banana, cheap. A fresh, warm turban of bread. A bottle of root-water. A twist of honey. Cheese. She was a cheerful sight upon the street. She skipped like someone half her age. She took the stairs two at a time. She found a dancing path between the sleeping Princesses, and spread the breakfast on the boards. She broke the bread and cheese. She snapped the banana into three, and mashed one third with rootwater in a spangled cup until it ran like gruel and was thin enough for Victor to swallow.

She woke up Em and then woke Victor too. He was not ready for the day. He wailed like a damp yew log in the fire. She pinched him on his arm until tears dropped heavily and he was wide awake and mutinous. Em tried to push her sister back, but Aunt was stronger. She lifted Victor by his arms and held him tightly at her side. He beat her with his wrinkled fists. She said, ‘Now watch!’ She undid the loops of her woollen top, and pushed her clothes aside. She put her index finger in the twist of honey and wiped it on her tiny nipple. The honey sagged like candle grease. Aunt pinched Victor one more time. His voice made pigeons fretful on the roof. Aunt put him firmly on her breast. The silence was as sudden and as comic as a burst balloon. He pressed his mouth and tongue onto her skin. He sucked and made the noises that children make when drinking juice through straws. ‘You see? He doesn’t need a knife and fork,’ she said. ‘Or milk.’ She outlined how they would share the child. They’d work the boy in shifts. ‘Four tits beat two,’ she said. ‘Ask a cow. And honey’s got the edge on milk. Ask bees.’

Em watched her baby nuzzling at her sister’s breast, as fickle when it came to food as adults are with love. He threw his head from side to side and tried to get a proper grip on this modest nipple, this impermeable and unswollen breast, this honeycomb. He was engrossed and sweetly satisfied and, for the moment, wanted nothing else. Em almost wished that she and Victor were still marooned beneath the parasol.

4

SO THIS WAS Victor’s life. Two lives, in fact. While other children learnt to crawl and pick up what they found as if the world was all a toy and theirs, he shared two women’s breasts. His gums grew numb on honey. His nose was flattened by their ribs.

Em still preferred to work the marketplace. She knew the faces there and all the odours were the odours of the countryside, congested and compressed. She’d lost the parasol. Its pole had ended up on someone’s fire. Its cheerful canopy was ripped and jettisoned. But she sat cross-legged for harvesting (‘We’re harvesters. We do not beg,’ her sister had said) in the usual spot, between the garden and the market, her back against the flat trunk of her tree. It was a comfort when she saw crops of the class and quality that her birth village had produced — ‘yellows’ from the potato fields, carrot clumps, onion sets, the stewing roots, sweet dumpling pumpkins, the dusty shingle of the beans — all so familiar from the days when she and all the other village kids had been dragooned to join the harvesters so that the crop could be brought in quickly and at its best.

She’d known, she would know still, all villagers apart from the shape of their arses. A bean field when the beans were splitting was a field of arses facing bluntly upwards as villagers played midwife with the soil. A potato field was much the same. The horse plough turned the soil — and then the village bums were higher than the noses for the day as harvesters with trowels sought out the timid ‘yellows’ in the crevices and punctures of the soil. These townies only dined on such fresh crops because the country folk were not too proud or idle to stick their arses in the air. Em slowly had convinced herself — with Aunt’s help — that coins given to her now were payment for the hours that they’d spent as girls, unpaid, with blackened hands and aching backs amongst the produce of their fields.

She harvested the marketplace, less passionately, less urgently, than she had done before her sister arrived. She had a place to sleep, a family, a group of friends, somewhere to wash and eat, a simple route to and from her work, free time. She felt no different from the other working women in the marketplace and garden, the waitresses and salesgirls, the prostitutes — that is to say, she felt as bored, inured, and dutiful as anyone who has to labour for their pay.

While Aunt slept late, Em took the morning and the midday shift because those were the times when people came to shop for vegetables and fruit, the times when the Soap Market and the Soap Garden were most profligate and careless with their cash. She served her time, with Victor at her breast. She had a little milk and honeyed nipples to keep her outsized baby still. And if he tried to raise his head? Or twist to see the world pass by? She only had to wrap his head inside her shawl for him to quieten or to doze. The darkness was a drug for him. His pulse was slower underneath the cloth than when his ears and eyes were naked to the clamour and the city light. If he cried, Em simply hushed him with a dab of honey on her breast, and murmured country comforts to him with her lips pressed to his cheek or ear. ‘The squeaky door gets all the oil,’ she’d say. ‘The gabby cat gets cream.’ She found rhymes and games to put him on the breast. ‘Ring the bell,’ she said, and tugged the wayward quiff of hair on Victor’s head. Then, ‘Knock the door.’ She drummed her fingers on his forehead. ‘Lift the latch’: she pinched his nose and — that’s the nature of the nose — his jaw dropped down, his mouth agape. ‘And walk right in!’ She placed her honeyed nipple on his lower lip.

In the early afternoon Victor’s skipping aunt would come with bread or cheese to share with any fruit or salad that Em had harvested that morning. There was no food for Victor then. He only fed at night. ‘The hungry mongrel does not bark,’ Aunt said. She made these nonsense phrases up, to mock her sister, to mock herself. She liked to play the country muse for those foolish men in bars who’d pay for hollow ‘wisdoms’ such as that. She was not right about the hungry mongrel — but she was wise to caution against feeding Victor while he worked. A sated child will not take honey. A sated child cannot be blackmailed by the promise of a meal. It’s hungry circus seals that sit obediently on tubs and balance beachballs on their snouts. The more they are rewarded with a fish, the more they flap and slither out of line.

When Aunt and Em had eaten, Victor was passed on. His face was pressed against the younger breasts, where the honey was not mixed with the blood-hot residues of milk, but where the torso flesh was deeper, softer, less discrete. Aunt tied him to her with a sash which passed around her neck and round her waist. His body was not long, but long enough by now to make Em’s sister stoop a little from the toppling ballast of his weight. Em was now free to walk back to their attic rooms or buy a little food or bring the family washing to the public washing square at the centre of the Soap Garden, or sleep.

Her sister carried Victor to her usual haunts, the bars, the restaurants, the tea salons, of the medieval streets to the east of the station yard. She wore Victor like she wore her hat, an accessory to her outfit and her act. She’d show her knees — at least — to anyone who’d pitch-and-toss some silver in her hat or place a coin ‘on my baby’s cheek’. If any man seemed slow to search for change, she’d wink at all his friends and ask, with the innocence of a music-hall soubrette, ‘What’s wrong with him? Has he got a snake in his pocket, or what?’ She’d lean over dining tables with Victor gummed to her breast like a bloated termite at a grape, and invite the diners — loosened by the wine or beer — ‘to place a silver coin on my baby’s eyes if you want fortune and good health’. It sounded like an age-old rite. In fact, she’d dreamed it up. If young Victor raised his head, to bare his honeyed teeth and scare off custom with his cries, then Aunt would knock his head back to the breast with the speed and firmness of a factory foreman, bent on keeping working children’s noses to the loom or press or lathe. She was not hard. She simply liked the way she was, and wished to keep it so. What sort of kindness would it be — to whom? — if she behaved towards the boy as if he were a rich man’s son whose duties only stretched from play and food to sleep? What money would she harvest on the street with Victor in her care, if Victor were the normal child, allowed to crawl and scream and play with stones exactly as he wished, if Aunt was just another ‘mother’ in the town? Where was the sentiment, the plaintiveness in that? Who’d pay for such mundanity? So trading says, The child must suck the breast. Six coins out of ten are lost unless the child is on the breast. So, Child on Breast! That was the requisition of the working day.

It was not fair that Victor did not seem a willing volunteer in this. ‘This kid’s a gold mine,’ Aunt had said. He kept the sisters fed and clothed. He kept them decent, free from sin. They did not have to steal or prostitute themselves or find thin comforts and escape in drink, while Victor was still small. They did not have to learn the trade of dipping — picking pockets, that’s to say — while Victor’s tiny grazing head was eloquent enough to make hard men and stony women pick their own pockets of small change.

They used the child as bait, it’s true. Put crudely and unadorned like that, it makes the sisters less than kind. But Less than Kind is not the same as Without Love. He was their ‘little blessing’; their meal ticket, too. They loved him for the gift he gave them: he saved them from the grinding molars of the city which seized on women very much like Aunt and Em and made them old and sick and spiteful within days. Imagine Em and Aunt without a child. No need. Just think of all the country girls who lived and begged and starved alone in cities such as ours, across the world, in those dead days before the rich bred consciences, before the telephone, the car, the welfare cheque, the safety net, the thawing of the civic heart. The lucky ones kept jobs. They laboured over stoves. They scuffed their knees in cooling clinkers as they raked out grates at dawn. Perhaps they flirted with a stable hand or — more ambitiously — exchanged embraces with madam’s chauffeur. Perhaps they fell in love and, if their half-days coincided with their sweetheart’s — rare chance, indeed — they walked unfettered for an hour, embraced by city crowds and understanding all too well that this was the best that life in towns would offer them, that there was worse awaiting them, if they should lose their looks or tempers or good luck. They could be roofless, empty-gutted, and with no embraces to exchange except those given to their own rough knees, at night.

So why should Aunt and Em not count themselves as blessed in having Victor? Why should they not take care to put him to good use, and love him still, and love him all the more? They liked the independence that he gave. They did not know — he did not know — that they had robbed him of his liberty, that their ribcages were for him two sets of prison bars, their arms his warders, their breasts his sedatives.

They went about their business, dawn till dusk, and ploughed a life. Quite soon — within a year and a half, when Victor was three, with teeth — they had harvested enough to move downstairs, below the attic rooms where the changing cast of Princesses had made the sisters ill at ease. They rented one small room in a crowded family apartment. It was their own. There was a tap and a small coal stove that they could use in the raised courtyard at the back. There was a communal but a proper toilet too, in an outhouse. The sisters took their turn in emptying the ‘honey can’ when it was full. Was this the ‘citizenry ’ that they sought? There was no time to ask. There was no time to sit like sisters, face to face, and knit a conversation from the warming wool of gossip, hope, and love. Em had to be at work before the traders took their breakfasts in the bars. Aunt had to be at work until the restaurants had closed and all the rich and drunk had gone back home. So Victor grew weaker, older, a city child whose landscape was all ribs and cloth and honeyed, female flesh. The stones and mayhem of the street were ever at his back, a hidden world imagined only from its hums and dins and choruses.

What does a small boy know, a child that — by this time — is barely four? A toddler who has yet to crawl? A little smothered lad? A boy who is trained to do nothing but drape and nuzzle like a bean-sized joey in its mother’s pouch? How could young Victor tell that this routine of facing flesh all day was not normality? He was no revolutionary in bud, no mystic with a notion of a patterned world. He was just worm — a mouth, an arse, a readiness to bend. He sought the softest earth, the warmest way, the stone that had no jags, the twilight safety of the breast. He had no choice. They’d got him trained, just like a dog. He knew that if his head went up and turned towards the lights, a hand much stronger than his head would push him back. He knew that if he spat the nipple from his mouth and raised his chin to cry he would not get what he was crying for, unless he wanted pinches on his legs or Aunt to hold his nose.

He had no general sense of smell. The cloying odours of the honey and the herby alkalescence of the breast blanked out the city smells, the horses and the fruit, the men with pipes, the scent, the woodsmoke, the urine, and the puddled rain. His eyes were clinkered with the grit of too much sleep. The underlids were sore from lack of air and exercise. They did not focus well in light — and streamed at night when he was fed with solids in the oval, orange thrall of candlelight. His legs and arms had not grown strong. They’d had no chance to punch and kick the air. His hands were good for nothing needing pull or grip. He lived for sound alone. His mouth was sealed — but his ears were free and open to the world. He knew the market cries, the trundle of a porter’s cart, the curses of the men weighed down by baskets of crops, the whistles of a happy man. He knew the tucks and folds of Em’s sweet murmurs from the challenge and the bounciness of Aunt’s street voice. He knew them, but could not clothe them with a shape or form. They were just sounds to him. Sound is air made tangible. No one flourishes on air alone.

As he got older, heavier, so Em and Aunt got tired of harvesting the streets. It was less fun, living in their shrunken home, away from all the toughness and the jollity of the Princesses above. The sisters got on well enough because they hardly met, because they hardly talked. And just as well. If they had met and talked more frequently they would have found what many siblings find when they have fled the nest, that sharing parents is no guarantee that temperaments are also shared. The only thing they did as family was sleep together, sharing mats, with Victor in between. Their bodies were the rails of Victor’s cot.

Aunt took the boy onto the streets with less enthusiasm as he grew older, as he passed four. He weighed too much. His body was too long; when he was ‘feeding’ his feet found footholds on her knees. It made no sense to carry him, but Aunt was not prepared to sit with Victor on her lap all day, a fixture on some restaurant steps or at the entrance to a bar, waiting for the harvest to make its way to her. She was the sort who liked to move about, to have a stage, to work (she said) ‘my mouth and not my bum’. She tried to keep him entertained, yet keep him also blind and nuzzling at her chest. She had not learnt the sentimental skills of entertaining kids. They liked crude noises, little nonsense rhymes, and songs with simple choruses. What kind of child would understand or like Aunt’s running commentary on the world, the adult jokes, the cynicism of her words as she earned money on the streets?

‘This one’s a soft touch,’ she would say, as she — with Victor held aloft — approached a woman sitting, waiting, at a table in the garden of a tea salon. ‘Look at that coat! She’s good for a fifty at the very least.’ And then, ‘A twenty! God, she’s tight. Look at her little walk. You’d think her bum was made of tin. Her boyfriend’s out of luck tonight for sure …’

Or else, ‘Hey! This fellow’s giving me the eye. Suck, Victor, suck. It turns ’em on. Hold tight. I’ll give my hat a little twirl. And show my teeth … Aha! He’s got his rhubarb up. What did I say? Two fifties and a wink. I bet his wife don’t know he’s got “expenses” in the town like me. She’d have a fit if she could see her little chap’s so loose with cash.’ Or else, ‘Oh dearie dear, here’s a fellow looks as if he’s wee’d on nettles and doesn’t like the potpourri. His lady’s stood him up, I bet, or else his boss has stood him down. “Hey, mister! Put some silver on the baby’s eye. Whatever’s wrong will turn out right!” Well, well, we’re not surprised. He’d rather that we went away. It would appear he does not wish to give to charities like us.’ Or (Aunt’s step and manner quickened as she saw men outside a bar), ‘Smiles on parade. This lot are drunk enough to spit cash in my hat!’

The truth is, Victor grew to like his aunt’s brash tones, despite his inability to understand the words. He liked the way she walked the streets and joined in badinage and arguments and helped herself — and him — to uneaten titbits from restaurants. He began to lift his head more often now or find a sideways view onto the world of streets and bars. Aunt did not care enough to push him back to feed. She’d tired of having sticky honey on her blouse, of having this stretched infant invade her clothes. Life was more comic and more profitable if she just put him down inside a restaurant gate and let him topple under waiters’ feet while she did routines with her tongue and hat. Here was an education of a kind. He learnt about the legs of chairs, and shoes. And once — the final straw — he learnt that tablecloths could move, if tugged. He learnt, too, what fun it was to have a bowl of lukewarm noodles smash onto the floor. He’d never had a toy so wonderful as noodles and the broken bowl. The mistress of the restaurant, of course, was not charmed by Victor’s play, or by the mess of tablecloth and food. ‘I do not care to see you back in here,’ she told Aunt, as Victor draped the noodles round his fingers. ‘Not unless you’re eating à la carte. Get off our premises. Remove yourselves. Go back into the haystack where you belong. No beggars here. Understand? If you don’t want to eat, stay on the street.’

She took Aunt by the arm and pushed her towards the doorway.

‘And don’t forget the kid,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have a kid. It’s not his fault. Look at the state of him! What kind of person lets their little boy crawl on the floor like that? You shouldn’t even have a kid if you can’t live respectably …’

‘All right,’ said Aunt, to stifled laughter from the clientele, as Victor stretched the noodles in his hands, as Victor squashed the noodles on his legs. ‘No need to work up blisters on your lips.’

‘That could have been a bowl of soup,’ Em said, when Aunt recalled their escapades that night. ‘You could have scalded him!’ The time had come, it seemed to Aunt, when her sister was a hindrance in her life. Victor, too. He had lost her more than she could earn if she were on her own. At four, at almost five, the boy was far too big for comfort. More frequently she failed to turn up at the marketplace to take the child off Em. Or else she said, ‘Why don’t you keep the kid and stay here longer? You’ll get more. You’re his proper mum, and people aren’t fooled by me. Not any more.’

So Victor lost the chance he’d had with Aunt to lift his head more frequently, to glimpse the world with one eye shut, to study feet and floors. He was back, full time, where he belonged, an outsized infant on his mother’s breast. He was confined again.

5

AND WHAT OF EM? How did she feel? How did she fill her time? She thought of nothing else but getting home, though home was not the five-by-five she shared with Aunt, but the sagging country cottage with a yard and thatch and pigs where she herself was raised, or the saddlemaker’s rented workshop where she had snubbed her husband’s candle out. Just as Victor came to live on fictions of the countryside, so Em looked back upon the village she had known. She made a tinselled paradise of it. It was the marketplace transformed, the ranks of vegetables, the fruit, strewn loosely in arcadia. It was a world where everything was ripe and colourful and sweet and free. It was a buffed and shiny version of the village she had known before her husband had — both country phrases — earth as eyelids, and his eternal freehold on a narrow strip of land.

How wonderful the city had once seemed, how promising. But now she felt that she had reached her highest rung and that her city life was in descent. How long would it be before she was as blunted by the foraging for food and cash as those other mothers she had met? The ones who hired their children out. For what? They dared not ask. The ones who used creams and grease and face ointments to make their kids seem daft or ill or menacing. The ones who kept their ageing babies on the breast by stunning them with pods of opium or mandrax tea.

A country beggar such as her must have good looks or youth or, at least, a helpless infant to hook the passers-by. She’d lost her looks. Her hair was now as lifeless as the leaf tuft on a pulled beetroot. Her clothes sat on her like a saddle on a goat’s back. Em was so thin — said Aunt, who had a phrase for everything — that her belly-button and her backbone kissed, and squeaked. She’d lost her youth, as well. Five years and more of city life could take the paint off carriages or stunt a country oak, make flowers grey, drain country faces of their rosy brightness and etch in lines as ploughs put furrows in a field. She’d still got Victor. What use would he be when he grew? He was only helpless now because she and beggaring had kept him so. How long before he turned his back on her and said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ve spent too long already in your lap. I’m going to open my eyes and stretch my legs and see this city for myself.’

Small children ran past Em when she was begging in her usual spot, children who were younger than Victor but already had loud voices and strong legs and who were never still. Yet Victor, as he aged, moved with less frequency, not more. He was inert, as if these years of falsifying on his mother’s breast had robbed him of pluck.

Em knew that you could train or trick a chicken to lay down dead, as motionless as stone. She’d seen it done when she was young. It was a common village trick. You pushed the chicken to the ground. You held its wings. You pressed its beak into the dust, and drew a hard and short and rapid line in coal, or chalk, or channelled in the soil, out from its beak end. The hen was hypnotized. It was geometrically transfixed. It could not lift its beak clear of the line. You had to rap the chicken’s beak to make it stand again and take part in the world. They said that without this liberating rap upon its beak the chicken would just fade away, pressed to the dust by weights that could not be seen or touched. What should Em do to lift the weights from Victor’s head? She feared that he would fade away as well, made weak and thin by too much breast and too much mother’s lap, his rigid, geometric life. Her only remedy — given that to stay in town meant begging could not end — was to retrace the journey out of town. To walk back down the boulevards until the tram tracks reached the turning gear, and metalled roads grew narrower and rutted, and drains were ditches, and gas streetlamps no longer held their sway amongst the stars or repelled the flimsy light of dawn.

‘The first thing you’ll see beyond the blue of manac beans,’ she told her son, her palm outstretched, his hands both tucked and curled beneath her shawl, ‘is how our village seems to have a mind that’s all its own. The river there, it doesn’t run fast and straight, not like the drains and culverts of the city do. The river takes its time. It’s like a snoozer snake. That’s the slowest snake there is. It coils between the fields so slowly that you never see it move. Or else it moves, but only when our backs are turned, at night perhaps, on days when it is raining pips and pods and we are kept indoors. Except your father never stayed indoors. He used to love the rain and stand in it. To get the smell of leather out, he said. He’d wash the leather and the tannin out of him with rain, and let it run off down the gutters of the lane into the snoozer snake, then downriver till the smell and dye on him was swept right out to sea. That’s what he said, “Right out to sea,” though we were nowhere near the sea. I loved it when your father spoke like that. It made the sea seem ours. It smelt like the saddles that your father made.’

Em told Victor what fun they had — would have — in fields, at harvest time, with all the fattest rabbits, the lizards, and the snakes trapped in the last stands of the corn, how captured rabbits could be skinned and salted for the pot, how lizards could be raced or made to shed their tails, how harmless snakes could cause distress when dropped in people’s laps or hidden in a grandma’s drawer. She told him how the packers used to — for a laugh — put a snoozer in the top of apple barrels and send them both to market. ‘To this Soap Market here maybe,’ she said. They’d laugh themselves as wet as cress at what the market men would do when they dipped in their hands to pull out pippins and reinettes and found the fleshy, yellow fruit of snake.

She told Victor, too, some other time when he demanded ‘Village Talk’, how he had come about.

‘We thought you up,’ she said, ‘one Sunday afternoon.’

It was September and the mushrooms on the beech cobs were getting high and tasty. ‘Your Dad and me went out to fill a basket. And then — we’d only been married for two months — we had, you wouldn’t understand, a kiss and cuddle there and then. It had to be that time because I know that when we took the mushrooms back we found a birth-bug in amongst them. That’s a sign, for sure, that you’ll get fat with child. Your Dad hung a key on a string above my tummy. It swung clockwise, that’s how we knew you were a boy. Anticlockwise is for girls. We picked on Victor as your name straight away. You never were an it to us; you were always a he. You always had a name. Though your grandad on your father’s side — he thought he knew a thing or two. He said it had to be a girl, anticlockwise was for boys, we were muddled up. He got a pair of scissors and a knife. He hid them underneath two bits of cloth on two kitchen stools. He put the stools side by side right in the middle of the scullery. He called me in. He said sit down. Your dad was there. Your aunt was? … no, she’d left already for the maiding job in town. Your grandfather said, “Select a stool, the one that seems the best for you, the one that’s calling you by name. Go on, sit down.” I sat down on the scissor stool. “That settles it,” he said. “The baby’s going to be a girl. The knife’s a boy. The scissors are for girls.” They neither of them got to see you born. Both dead. His father first, then yours. When you were born I saw the key was wiser than the stool. I dreamt one night your grandad came back from the dead to see the baby girl. He got a shock. He saw your little dinkle there. I said, “What kind of clockwise girl is that, she’s got a knot between her legs?” I gave your thing a little push. “What’s that then, Pa?” “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and then, “I wouldn’t want it on my eyelid as a wart.” ’

She told these stories to her son. He took them in, eyes shut, laid out across her lap. He did not understand the half of what she said, a quarter of the words. What could it mean, the key was wiser than the stool? That knives are boys and scissors girls? And rain was pips and pods? And sea was saddle? A normal child of four or five would think it all a strange and — finally — a tiresome game, to bend words in a way that was confusing and not funny. Kids of that age would know the shorthand of the street, the beg and tell of play, the arrow accuracy of simple words. They’d know how smell and shape and distance made sense of sound, how words were rounded, focused tools which served the moment, did the job, and left no waste. But as we know, Victor was no normal child. For him the words his mother spoke were two-dimensional, a sheet of sound, a shallow wash of stories from his mother’s village and the past. He had no role to play except to keep his head and body still, and listen hard.

He did not know — despite his age — the trick of speaking sentences or how to make his mark with words. He had not learnt to shout, or tease, or burble rhythmic nonsenses like other children do. On those few times — at night or when his aunt was minding him — when he was spoken to by strangers or Princesses or by the family from whom they hired their room, he could not form replies. He could not speak. He was in that respect, and others, too, a baby still. He was comforted by breast. He did not have the skill to feed himself. His bladder and his bowels had open gates. Anything he chanced upon — an apple core, a pin, a cockroach case — he tested with his mouth. He was not happy on his feet. He never ran. He could not dress himself or tie the laces on his shoes. You would not guess he had a temper, or that he wanted anything beyond the milk, the honey, and the whispers that seemed to keep him calm.

In one respect, Victor, in those years before our city was hustled like so many others into war and weaponry, was more adult than his years. He had, at least, a muscular and exercised imagination; that is to say the tales his mother told confused him, yes, but still they entered him and filled his mind as music enters infants far too young to grasp its geometric principles, its hieroglyphs, its rhythmic cunning. So when Em retold Victor for the third? the thirteenth? time how he had come about — ‘we thought you up amongst the mushrooms’ — he formed a picture in his head concocted from the wooden tubs of mushrooms which he knew in the marketplace and the single mushrooms which dropped and rolled from time to time within Em’s reach at her station on the approaches to the Soap Garden. He saw himself a pink but ragged mushroom, odorous, peaty, one day old. The basket was his crib. It was a frozen fairy tale for him, an illustration from a children’s book. The tighter that he pressed his eyes together the clearer the image was; the larger and the pinker the mushroom; the rounder, the smoother, the waxier the forests and the fields which were the backdrops to his ‘thinking up’. The world of passersby, of market porters, trundling barrowloads of cauliflowers, fruit, which Victor saw when his mother did not talk and he was tempted to turn his head and lift his lids a little, was chaotic and without pattern when compared to that village world he structured from his mother’s words.

The irony was this, the richness of his life was richness second-hand. His mother’s childhood and her adolescence in the village landscape was made shiny and intense by distance and by time. It was Victor’s milk and honey now. He fed on it. It kept him quiet and still and satisfied. He was a country boy. The city was the dream. He opened half an eye to fall asleep. He woke to find the nightmares crowding in. He dozed, caressed by Em’s refurbished better times, and by higher skies and fresher winds and more magical conjunctions than any city could provide. Imagine what an inner world — bright and sanitized — a boy would make of all this country talk, curled up as warmly and as darkly as a sparrow in a wolf’s mouth. It would be nowadays, what? a theme park marketed as Rural Bliss? The film-set for a country musical? The sort of hayseed Kansas encountered on the road to Oz?

How could a child not be charmed by rural nights when skies were punctured by white stars, and dreams disturbed by falling fruit in orchards where the plums and pears and oranges grew side by side in such harmony that it would seem they shared the branches of one tree? How could he resist the baffling cussedness of grandpa’s anticlockwise cottage door?: Put the key upside down into the backward lock. Turn it the wrong way. And lift! What boy would not desire a village party feast, with a table placed outdoors, or set his heart upon a birthday chair decked and garnished in the finest greenery to be his country throne?

‘I promise you,’ Em told her son, ‘that when the warmer weather comes we’ll put our things into a bag and walk back home.’ She rolled the candle stub across his cheek. ‘We’ll put a light to this. We’ll lie awake at night and listen to the apples drop. When you are six you’ll have a leafy birthday chair.’ She meant it, too — though it was clear that Victor was not strong enough to walk much further than the market rim.

She could not carry him. He was too big and badly ballasted. But she was clear what they would do. At night the marketeers left wooden trolleys parked in the cobbled alleyways between the dormant trading mats and baskets. She’d help herself to one. The market owed her that. She knew which one to take. A trader who was kind to her and gave her fruit and greens when they were cheap possessed a painted cart which was not unlike a child’s perambulator. It had solid rubber tyres and, when he pushed it, it seemed quite light and manoeuvrable.

‘That’s your carriage passing by,’ she’d tell her son. ‘It’s full of winter melons now — but soon you’ll be travelling in it like a little king.’ Em smiled as sweetly as she could at her innocent benefactor and the means of her escape. It was not theft to take this cart from such a kindly man. She’d cushion it for Victor with all their clothes and they’d set off at night. She was not the sentimental sort, nor given to ungrounded optimism, yet at those moments when her mood was grey or stormy she could calm herself with just the thought of Victor in the cart at that point where the trams and city stopped and turned, and where blue fields began.

6

IT WAS AT DAWN, in fact, in May, when Victor was a month short of his sixth birthday, that Em at last gained freedom from the town. More freedom than she’d bargained for. She was asleep, and warm enough to have pushed her blanket back and stretched her naked arms beyond the pillow and her head. Her forehead was red and wet with perspiration. Her nose was blocked and whistling when she breathed. She had not been well. A cough had kept her sitting up until the early hours. The floorboards and the blankets puffed stale air and dust. The room was heavy with the smell of damp clothes and candle smoke and sleep. If she awoke she’d find her head was aching, a ring of pain which was most fierce and unforgiving behind her eyes and in the shallow dell between the tendons of her neck.

Victor had slept, of course. Or lain still, at least, throughout the night. But when the morning light started to infiltrate the room’s single whitewashed window glass, he sat up and crawled across the floorboards to the pot. He straddled it on hands and knees and spread his legs. He pissed like donkeys piss but with less steam. He had a donkey’s aim as well, and wet the floor a little. He watched his urine sink into the wood and make dramatic grains in what had been a grey and lifeless board. He called for Em to wake and see the patterns that he made. When she did not wake he kicked the pot — in irritation — with his heel, so that the triple waters of the night were spilled.

It was in part an accident, but one which suited him. He knelt and rocked upon his hands to watch the family waters as they sought the cracks and contours. The stewed-apple smell of urine. The apple yellow-green of bladder juice. He let the fluid swell and flow and soak. He let it coil and curl round knots of wood. The snoozer snake again. He watched the stream gain power on the floor until it reached the impasse of a raised timber. It formed a pool; it leaned and strained and then set off at a new angle. It had almost reached Aunt’s shoulder when Victor pulled her arm to wake her up. He called, ‘Water down!’ His words made Aunt sit up in alarm and look around, expecting ceiling leaks or Judgement Day. Em was too tired to wake for leaks or Judgement Day. The best that Aunt and Victor could do was watch the urine seep away, as Em slept on and coughed.

‘We’d better wash it down,’ Aunt said at last. ‘Get the water can.’ She dressed him in a pair of knee-length trousers and a jacket, no underclothes, no shoes, and put on her own coat and hat above her nightcloth.

‘We’ll see if we can earn ourselves a nice fresh loaf, as well,’ she said.

Together they went down the stairs, Aunt first, then Victor, bumping on his bottom down each step. They left the water can beside the tap in the yard and went outside. They walked along the central street, nipped narrow by the district’s pair of wooden gates, into a squint too rough and angular for carts or crowds. There was a bakery two streets away. The first loaves of the day were cooling in their tins. The men who sold them on the city streets from shallow raffia trays were gathering to load their merchandise and check that all the bread they took was free of pockmarks, burns, and splits. The loaves with blemishes would not be sold and so the traymen made the baker take them back into his shop. There’d be disputes. And sometimes, when a loaf was badly deformed or split enough to earn the name of Devil’s Hoof, the baker would toss it to the pigeons or to the early vagrants waiting there. Most mornings all they had to breakfast on was smell, though even the odours of a fresh, warm loaf are more filling than the scents of other streets where there are riches but no food. As luck would have it that day, the ovens had not let the baker down. His yeast had risen evenly. His dough had not bubbled into caves, or cloven like a devil’s hoof, or browned in patches. It all looked good and saleable and — with flour priced the way it was — expensive, too.

Aunt would not carry Victor, though he lobbied her for a piggyback. She made him walk, but let him hang onto her arm or hold her hand. He seemed unnerved to be out on the street and not pressed closely to his mother. He was free — if he wanted — to do what any other boy would do, that is to run ahead into the smell of bread which beckoned them. They moved through the almost empty, almost daytime streets, between two smells. The smell of loaves. And, now, behind them, out of sight, the smell of burning wood.

Which Princess knocked the candle over, or struck the careless match, it is hard to say. The girls themselves all blamed it on the one they liked the least, or else said arsonists (in the landlord’s pay) or some spurned man or neighbours with a grudge had set the attic room alight. Who said that candlelight was luck?

Why there should be matches, candles, arsonists in the apex of that building at dawn no one could readily explain. But what was sure was that there was fire and smoke. By the time the first Princess had woken, the flames had found a carriageway of draughts and were unrolling like a lizard’s tongue across the room. Less surreptitious, simpler flames climbed walls and snapped their lips at curtains and at paint. The smoke at first was almost white and then, when the fire had reached the Princesses’ mattresses and their clothes and had brewed sufficient heat to peel the blackened paint off window ledges, the smoke became heavier and darker. It was laden with the ash and dust which had been buoyed and agitated by the flames. Its colour now was blacker than the worst burnt loaf. It smelt and tasted like a new-shod horse.

The Princesses, when they woke — or were woken with a shake — did not stop to check the cause of the fire. Already they could hardly breathe, and one or two, the screamers there, had singed their throats. They ran, not for water to put out the fire, but for fresh air and safety in the street. The stairs were narrow. There were falls, and breakages. A young girl broke her begging wrist (and made a fortune out of that for the nineteen months she kept the bandage and the splint in place). Another broke her neck, and almost died before she reached the bottom step. But not one Princess was licked by too much flame. Nor did any one of them get left behind, curled up in blankets, to suffocate in the airless caverns hollowed by the heat. They banged on doors as they went down into the lower levels of the building. They raised their neighbours out of bed, but no one took it on themselves to check in every room that there was not a pet cat or a sleeping child that should be saved. They simply passed the message on, and messages are bound to end when they reach deaf or hidden ears. Once the refugees had reached the street, and looked around to check the faces there and comfort those who were blackened or distressed, no one noticed Em was not amongst the crowd. In fact, some swore they saw her standing there, with Aunt and Victor, breakfasting on bread.

Em slept. She was so tired, and dreaming too. The noise and smoke, they said, must have been the scenery of dreams, so that they did not threaten her or make her wake. The smoke — they said, they said — would have sunk into her room from the attic and curled up where she lay and hugged her tight and dry before the flames came down the stairs. They said she would have dreamed her death and felt no pain. But who can tell? Perhaps the truth is this, Em woke. Who would not wake when there was so much noise and anarchy, when the timbers cracked and grumbled like Epimenides the Slumberer who woke, stiff and dry and fiery, from two hundred years of sleep? Her eyes were smarting; from dreams, she thought at first. But then the smell, the boiling vapours of the house, the smoke, the drumming hubbub of the flames, made confusions of that kind short-lived. She would have called at once for Victor, and gone down on her hands and knees to scrabble for him where she thought he slept. How long was it before she realized that he was safe? Or thought that he was dead? Or took the chance to save herself and all the rest be damned?

The smoke by then was far too thick and acrid for Em to see the window light, suffused by shadow and by whitewash even when there was no fire. She could only guess where the door was. Perhaps she found the wall and felt along it for the architraves. And then, empowered by some ancient sense of flight, found easy passage through her neighbours’ rooms into the hotter, fresh-brewed smoke which furnaced from the few remaining timbers in the flaming, disappearing stairwell. Did she die there, gasping, gaping like a fish on land for moist and icy oxygen and finding only pungent, scalding gas? Or did she simply curl up to drown beneath the fervent, swirling blanket of smoke in her own room, her husband’s unlit candle melting in her hand, her family’s spilt and puddled urine holding back the flames for just a trice, because she did not wish to live without her son? These are the questions everybody asked — and answered — for a day or two. But no one volunteered the truth, or called the owner in for questioning, or wondered why Princesses should play with fire at dawn. And no one asked, of course, how it could be that sixty-seven people slept in this four-storey house that had been built for ten. Or how they lived with just three taps and no gaslight and just two toilets in the yard. Or where the singed and heated dispossessed had found themselves new ‘homes’. Or why it was that no one came to name or claim the single blackened corpse.

Aunt should not take any blame. She and her nephew were moved away by policemen with the others in the crowd. The policemen did not care if those they moved were gawpers from the neighbourhood or residents. ‘Move on, move on,’ was all they understood, as if the drama of the streets was a private spectacle, cordoned off to everyone except those few who wore the ticket of a uniform. There were no firemen there or fire appliances. In neighbourhoods like that all epidemics, rioting and fires were left to run their course. The buildings, bodies, laws were not worth keeping thereabouts, it was thought. In fact, a city councillor had said the week before that the best prospect for the city was for all the tenements to be consumed by flames, for all the lawless poor to be dispersed by heat like rodents in a forest fire, for the squalid quarters of the city to be fumigated, cauterized. ‘Let’s build again. From scratch,’ he’d said.

Aunt and Victor were driven back along the street towards the bakery. Victor was crying from the shock and drama of the fire. He wanted Em. He wanted Mother now. He would not walk a pace, so Aunt was forced to lift him on her shoulders until the policemen judged that they had driven back the crowd to a safe and sterile distance. They turned and watched the smoke knit grey scarves above the roofs, with flecks of dying orange made by airborne sparks. Aunt asked those Princesses she recognized if they’d seen Em. They thought they had. They weren’t sure. Yes, yes, they’d seen her standing in the street eating bread with Aunt and Victor just a while ago. Or no, they hadn’t seen her, not for days. Em who? They didn’t know her by a name.

Aunt did not panic. She was sure that Em was safe. She’d heard it said the building had been cleared. In any case, the fire had started in the attic rooms, and all the attic girls seemed well enough if not exactly dressed for shopping or a ball. Em would have had more chance than them to wake, to dress, to come downstairs, to go in search of her sister and her son. What could Aunt do except stay calm? She was the calmest woman on the street. She was just glad that she had remembered to put on her hat, her battered cloche. It’s known that flames make snacks of straw.

The crowds were thickening, drawn by the smoke. Some men were trying to breach the line of police. They lived in houses close to the burning building. They knew that fire had legs and wings and that their rooms and homes were next in line. They’d only come onto the street to see what all the fracas was and, when they knew, to find a certain place of safety for their families. They’d found themselves expelled, pushed back from their front stairs, spectators to the colonizing heat.

‘Let’s fight the fire,’ they begged. ‘At least let us go home and save a thing or two, before it all goes up in smoke.’

‘Keep back,’ the policemen said.

Their commandant did not organize a chain of buckets or send for nurses from the sanatorium, or for the water pumps. He sent instead for mounted policemen and another van of men. This was his district and he knew that trouble on the streets would be a black mark in his book.

It was not long before the word was out that the city councillor who’d recommended, just a week before, that tenements like these should be brought down to earth by fire had got his way. How was it that the police were there, at dawn and in such numbers? Why was it that no one was allowed to investigate or to fight the fire? The police, the politicians, the nobs and profiteers who wanted all the city to themselves had come before the sun was up to make a furnace for the poor. It was not only hotheads in the crowd who now found cobblestones and staves or started pushing against the policemen’s chests. The neighbourhood — in both respects — was now inflamed. They’d beat themselves like moths against the cordon of the law to get nearer to the flames.

If there was fighting to be done, then districts such as this were good for volunteers. Young men with little else to do got out of bed and ran into the street. Beggars, hawkers, prostitutes, the unemployed, the young, the criminals, the men and women with grudges and with principles, in fact the sort who had scores to settle with the city and the police, were glad to add their lungs and muscles to the throng. The crowds were driven from the rear by rumours and by the more mature of troublemakers who, hanging back, felt safe to bruise the air with threats and insults. Their curses and their slogans, lobbed at the riot from the rear, caused punches, cobbles, bricks to be thrown at the front.

Riots are like fires. They look their best at night. They smoulder and they flare with greater drama when the sky is dark. They beckon and they mesmerize. This breakfast riot was short-lived. The city had no need of it. It had its work to do, its schedules and appointments to address, its daylight hours to endure. Those men — and the few women — hurrying down the pavements at that hour on their way to work had only time to poke their noses down the narrow lanes where they could see the police and smoke and hear the curses of the neighbourhood.

If this had been at dusk, not dawn, with all the duties of the day despatched, then only the most innocuous, the wariest, would pass the mayhem by. That’s something every beggar knows — that breakfast times are dead, that crowds proliferate when work is done and time is no longer money. At dusk the riot would have spread out of the narrow lanes, beyond the burning tenements. It would have helped itself to food and clothes through the broken glass of windows. It would have picked on men in carriages or cars and taken wallets, watches, hats, and paid for them with beatings. It would have toppled tram-cars, and started new and spiteful fires in districts where the residents were rich. But it was dawn, and spite was still abed. The police soon gained control with their horses and their truncheons and their farmdog expertise in splitting herds and cutting out the single troublemaker from the pack.

Five buildings burned. The Woodgate district lost its wooden gates. But only Em was killed. The tiles and timbers of the tenement fell all around her like the trees had fallen once across her village lane, that other breakfast time when the winds had stretched the memory and bent the tallest, oldest pines beyond endurance. The sun fell onto the cobbles of the street for the first time in who-knows-how-many? years. The fire-shortened tenements had cleared a path for it. It thinly penetrated smoke and waltzed like light on water as the wind gathered, turned and spread the ashy air.

The crowd were now subdued. The ones whose homes were outside the police lines went home. The unlucky ones stayed put. And waited. They prayed the wind would settle down and let the fires die. The residents of the five damaged buildings would be happy now to see the wind and flames whip up so that their grief could spread itself throughout the town, so everybody would know what it meant to wake at dawn in purgatory, and without blame, and with no hope of heaven as reward. But there is no patterned justice to the wind or rain. And rain there was, quite soon. It made the timbers steam. It dampened spirits. It cleared and cleaned the streets, so that the rivulets of rain which sped along the gutters took off the ash and dust which had so recently settled.

Em had been roasted and then dusted by the ash. The rain was her undertaker. It showered her. It made her cold and shiny almost, as ready as she could ever be for her discovery two hours later by, at first, a pair of dogs and then a sergeant in the police. By noon they’d brought a box for her. It was not easy to lift her body from the rubble. She was too well cooked. Her flesh was falling from the bone. They wrapped her in a blanket then and lifted her. They kept her in the city morgue, in ice, and out of sight. But no one came and so they gave her earthy eyelids in the common grave and put her on the register as ‘Woman, unidentified’.

Aunt still was calm. She knew where she should rendezvous with Em. The marketplace, of course. Em’s place of work. Her pitch where she had sat with Victor on her breast, palm out and up and heavy with coins.

‘You have to walk yourself,’ she said to Victor. ‘I’m not a donkey. Walk!’ She made him stand. She held his hand. ‘Come on. She’s waiting for us. Walk a little way, and then I’ll let you have a ride.’

Victor was shocked. Not by the fire, and not by fears of losing Em. But by the clutter and the hardness of the streets, by the smoke and horses, by the anger and the weeping, by his aunt’s strange mix of harshness and attention, her calmness and her urgency.

When he was eighty and looked back, it seemed to Victor that this was his first unfettered image of the town, that up till then he’d only glimpsed the city streets. At most he’d seen those dislocated country views of fruit in carts, of vegetables displayed on stalls, of shoppers, traders, bar loafers, from the waists down. He did not like what he was seeing now. He clung to Aunt’s hand and her skirts. His cheeks were wet. His chest was shaking, partly from the morning cold and partly from the bubble sobs which he could not suppress. He walked — a little gawkily, of course. He was still young. He was not strong — and wished that he could be elsewhere. His head was full of countryside; the snoozer snake, the falling fruit, the little king returning home in a carriage made for melons, the burning, lucky candle on the step, the birthday chair that’s legs were saplings, that’s back was green and woven like a wreath.

7

WHEN VICTOR WAS an older, richer man, a twenty-six-year-old with property and prospects and — already — half a grip on all the riches of the Soap Market, he found the time and sentiment to search the city archives for the bound and brittle volumes in which the local newspapers were preserved. He knew the year and month that Em had disappeared. He knew there’d been a fire and still retained the snapshot memory of being lifted to Aunt’s back and watching flames and scarves of smoke across her shoulder.

It was a morning’s work to find the thumbnail news item, amid reports of city trade and gossip and a world gone mad with war: ‘Five tenement houses frequented by itinerants, prostitutes, and beggars were fired during dawn disturbances yesterday in the city’s Woodgate district. Several rioters were detained and charged with assault and theft following attacks on police, fire officers, and local trading premises. The disturbances were initially occasioned, it is reported, by rivalry between criminal groups. The body of an unidentified woman was removed from the debris.’ The single-column headline was BREAKFAST ARSONISTS DETAINED.

But at the time Victor had no apprehension that his mother might be harmed. His aunt had said, ‘Come on, she’s waiting for us.’ His only fear was that he would be obliged to walk too far, before his aunt rewarded him with the donkey ride she’d promised on her back. He tugged her hand, so that his walking dragged on her. But she was tough and unlike Em. His tugs earned harder tugs from her. Her grip on his small hand was only soft if he matched steps with her. The instant that he slowed or faltered she bunched his finger bones. ‘Keep up,’ she said. Or, ‘Quickly now.’ He had to run to keep in step. Four trots of his to match her single stride. He’d rarely run before, except in play, and then the distance had been little more than wall to wall in their small room. He hadn’t realized the urgency, the clumsiness of speed, or how painful it could be.

Who knows what ants or termites feel when boys or bounty hunters kill the queen? Their structures fall apart. The soft, iron magnet lets her fleshy filings go, so even those far from the nest who have not witnessed the sacking of the royal chamber or seen the assassin’s needle impale the queen go listless-haywire at the instant of her death. Looking back, it seemed to Victor that the world that day was a pandemonium of ants, and ants without a queen. How else could he make sense of city streets, or cars and trams and carriages, of random, indiscriminating sounds, of pavement anti-patterns in which bodies flocked and fled like cream turned in a whisk, of Aunt once madly kind and now so rushed and unforgiving?

Aunt was quite certain, as she dragged her nephew by his finger to the marketplace, of two things — that Em was waiting in her usual place, that Em had perished in the fire. Or else a nightmare mixture of the two — that they’d find Em, her blackened palm outstretched, her thin, charred back propped up against the usual snag tree on the edges of the Soap Garden.

If they’d found Em, alive and well, their future would have been the past. They would have gone back ‘home’, to the countryside in May. At worst the springs and cushions of a swelling hedgerow are better bedding than the embers of a city fire. But his mother was elsewhere, and Aunt was not nostalgic for the pains and pleasures of the earth. She sat cross-legged all day at Em’s worn pitch. She’d give her sister till the night to resurrect herself and then she’d set about the task of finding once again a nesting box. Aunt did not try to put her nephew to the breast, or beg from passers-by. Victor was left to shuffle in the garden and the marketplace at will. At last. He loved and hated what he saw. He felt like we all feel when we’re first left at school — condemned to a freedom that at first seems narrower and more enclosed than the cell that’s family and home. The market paid him little heed, except to bruise and buffet him, and startle him with noise and colour.

His aunt was not a callous woman. She guessed the worst when Em did not show up. Her eyes were damp despite herself. But nor was she the sort to mope. If Em had disappeared, had died, was lost, had fled without her son, was lying in a pauper’s ward scorched and bruised by smoke and truncheons, then still the world went round, and breakfast followed dawn, and shitting followed food, and life went on. She gave her old straw cloche a whirl. She primped its dog-eared dog-rose sprigs in felt. She made its deep brim curl and grin and made a face herself to match. She wiped her eyes and, dutifully, checking one last time for Em, she went in search of Victor; and then, her nephew clinging to her back, she headed for the town.

Street luck is what the city excels at. Aunt’s hat (a little passé now), her smile, the boyish burden on her back, attracted comment from the livelier of the men she passed. One followed her — a man about her age, but dressed much older and in the bar-room style with patent shoes and collar studs, a soft homburg, trousers with a centre crease, a jacket of the latest cut with sloping pockets and long revers.

‘What’s that you’ve got on your back?’ he asked. ‘The kid must have seen that hat and thought he’d take a donkey ride!’ She answered cheek with cheek. She said the kid was paying for his ride. She was a human tram. ‘Jump up, if you can find the fare,’ she said (and winked). ‘There’s room inside for a little one.’

‘There’s more to me than meets the eye,’ he said, matching winks with Aunt. ‘Want to see? Hold on a bit …’

‘What bit exactly should I hold?’

‘Your tongue!’ he said.

They called him Dip, though he was known by many other names. His speciality was crowds. He’d dip a hand and make off with your purse and the most you’d feel would be a sense of loss and an unaccustomed lightness in the pocket. He could unclip brooches, take watches out of fobs and replace them with stones of matching weight, remove a banknote from a billfold and then put back the fold, swap a necklace for a length of string, steal (it was said) the glasses off your nose. Hard luck the lady who took a helping hand off Dip, who let him take her arm to cross the street or welcomed his assistance with the too-high step to board a tram. One hand at the elbow left one hand free to browse the handbag or the purse. Tough luck the well-heeled man who hovered in the street when Dip walked by. It only took the slightest nudge from him, a stumble, an apology. The man would never guess his pockets had been searched and emptied, his tram fare and silver tie clip stolen, his saint medallion removed.

At first, Dip’s interest in Aunt had been professional. A woman forced to give a piggyback to a tired child might have an unattended purse or, perhaps, an outer pocket which he could open up with just one brushing cut from the pivot blade of his pig-sticker. He’d been surprised when she drew close how young she was. And poor. And to his taste. He liked these country girls, their jollity, their give-as-good-as-take, their duelling repartee. This one was plump and scruffy, it was true. Beneath the disguise of the broad-rimmed cloche, her forehead and her upper cheeks were dry and pocked like grapefruit skin. But she had level eyes, a playful face, a comic angle to her chin, and — Dip, like every other man, had fantasies too strange to name — she satisfied his liking, his desire, for girls in hats. He’d never met a woman before who wore her hat with more flirtatiousness than Aunt. One glimpse of that had put his rhubarb up.

‘Please let me help,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry him. Where to?’

She shrugged: ‘Who knows?’

‘What’s your boy’s name?’ he asked.

‘Victor … and, anyway, he isn’t mine. You go and tend your own potatoes. It’s not your business who he is.’ That’s what she said, but what she thought was something else: This man is sent to us to take the place of Em. She let Dip take the boy from off her back and lift him in a flying angel onto his shoulders.

‘Where to?’ he asked again.

She told him all about the fire and Em and what their life had been; and telling it, she buried it, still warm. Life was too blunt and short to waste it on the dead.

Dip was enthralled by how Aunt span her hat whenever she was lost for words. He held his breath, as if his lungs were as fragile as frost, when she recounted how the men in bars had tossed their coins in her hat-brim to win themselves short glimpses of her legs. Here was a woman, he was sure, who was a gift from heaven and from hell. He jangled stolen coins in his pocket and hoped that he would get a chance to toss them too.

His room, he said, was near. So near that he could smell the market fruit from it. He offered her some floor.

‘And what about the kid?’ she asked.

It’s true, he thought. The kid is in the way. But then, he’s small and young. He’ll sleep. And when he sleeps? Who knows what might occur?

They put ‘the kid’ to sleep, and then they set to work. Aunt did her best to seem experienced, though, truth be told, she’d never suffered this intimacy before. She knew about it, naturally, but only in the way of comic patter, the sexual flirting that it took to beg some coins from a man, the flush and stillness that settled on them when her legs were on display and she was trading winks and innuendo.

Some Princesses — the prostitutes, the opportunists — had kept them all amused one night with stories of their clientele. How one old boy had paid good cash to watch a girl spit on his feet. How others wanted armpits licked (‘My wife would never kiss me there!’) or asked for entry by the tradesman’s door, or took their pleasure spiced with oaths the like of which would shock the guardians of hell. How the teenage sons of bourgeoisie were brought by uncles, godfathers, family friends to girls like them to ‘taste the fruit’ but more often begged for mercy and their innocence; or wept; or failed ‘to stiffen the worm’; or changed their minds when they found out what, how and where, it all involved; or came into their underclothes before their trouser buttons were undone; or wet themselves.

Aunt was prepared for oddities. She was prepared, in fact, to be amused. Hilarity, it seemed from what the Princesses had said, was the stablemate of making love, and Dip had shown that he liked fun. But she soon found herself more startled than amused. Dip’s kisses were the colonizing kind. His hands — those hands so used to slipping gently and unnoticed into pockets, tucks and folds — seemed suddenly to lose their expertise. His fingers — adept in crowds at unloosening, unfastening, unbuttoning — were trembling at the strings of the nightcloth which she still wore beneath her coat. He seemed uncertain how to deal with the clips on his braces. He tried to pass his hands through solid cloth. He seemed unable, or unwilling, to push his trousers down without Aunt’s help. His breathing had become so uneven and so laboured that Aunt began to think that they had better stop before the poor man had a fit and her new dream of moving in with a good and handsome city thief was ended with a death. His temperature was fluctuating. His face was red. His levity, his measured confidence — those two characteristics which had made Dip so attractive to Aunt — had disappeared. Instead here was a man who did not seem able to form a simple sentence, but was behaving with the blunt and charmless urgency of a child denied the breast. Indeed, quite soon his mouth was partly on her breast, and partly chewing on her cotton undershift. One hand pulled her heavy coat and nightcloth to her waist; his other hand was pushed too tightly — and was trapped — beneath his trouser band, beneath his underclothes.

One gentle shove from Aunt would have sent this Dip toppling like a trussed piglet onto the bare floorboards of his room. But Aunt was in no mood to shove. Despite her bafflement, she was at least gratified to be the centre of attention, to be the focus of Dip’s ballet buffo. It kept the grief of sisterhood at bay. She let him slide onto the mattress, his sinking head pressed to her chest … her abdomen … her stomach … her crutch … her thighs … her knees. She let him put his tongue between her toes. She laughed and laughed. No wonder prostitutes were such a jolly breed.

‘Undress,’ he said. ‘But not the hat.’

8

NOW DO YOU SEE the charm of cities? None of this adventure could have happened on the village green where Aunt and Em had first played tip-and-kiss with boys. There were no flirting, pocket-picking strangers to encounter there, in patent shoes and collar studs, with private rooms. The only available men were cousins all. Or neighbours’ sons. Or daft. They were as solid and as passionate as trees, as heroic and original as farmyard hens. That is to say they were all dull and without sin; their only privacy was sleep and shit. But city air makes free — and country pullets can become street cockatoos or fighting birds or songsters once they’ve shaken hayseed from their wings. So, Aunt and Dip, two village souls gone free and wild in city streets, could no more pass each other by than cats can pass a dish of cream.

The dipping and the begging became less urgent. They lived on love and bed. These were sufficient for a while. So when they woke, curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch, Dip breathing through the filter of Aunt’s hair, Aunt folded like an infant in his arms, it was not often long before they found themselves embracing face to face or delving in the blankets for a breast, a testicle, a pinch of fat. Sex was breakfast for these two. It fuelled them for the day. Sometimes they breakfasted at leisure, no stone unturned. At other times Aunt merely turned away and let Dip wriggle into her, to puff and quiver, for a minute at the most, at her buttocks and her back. Aunt did not care for breakfast much. Her appetite for love grew with the day. But she was content to let Dip make use of her after dawn, so long as — in the afternoons, at night — he’d do what she desired.

Each day they washed with water from a jug which Aunt had filled from the public fountain the evening before. They dried themselves on air. They dressed in their best, only clothes, and walked out into town not like the cockroaches they were, but eagerly and hand-in-hand. They had to eat. Aunt dealt with that. She knew which market men would happily part with bruised fruit, which bakeries threw out collapsed or wounded loaves, where trays of eggs were stored and could be reached by someone small and agile like herself, where it was easiest to snatch the bread or chops off diners’ plates in restaurants.

They needed money, too. Youth and love are spendthrifts both. Here Dip’s expertise gave them an undulating income. One day he’d lift a wallet with enough inside to last the week; and then a week would pass and all he’d get would be ‘blind purses’ containing buttons, tokens, keys, eau de Cologne, but not one coin. Dip did not choose his victims well. He’d rather pick their pockets comically so that Aunt — his witness from across the street — would be amused. He did not concentrate. He was on show. He took it as a challenge to remove a worthless glass and metal brooch from the lapel of a stern-faced, clucking woman, and lost all taste for lucrative yet humdrum theft. Aunt satisfied the predator in him. The time would come when he’d insist that she stayed in the room when he went out to work. He’d say she soured his good luck. But in those months when they first met he did not care if business was not good. A note or two, some silver change, would be enough to reunite their hands while they, leaving Victor in the room with blankets for his toys, went off to find a bar.

Aunt had a liking for the clear, cheap, country spirit known then as glee water, but now, of course, tamed and bottled by the drink barons and marketed as Boulevard Liqueur. It did not take a lot to make her drunk. One shot, and she would lay her hat and head on Dip’s shoulder, her hand upon his knee, her foot on his. Two shots, and she would press her lips against his ear and say what they’d do to pass the time when they got home, if Victor were asleep. She’d be a ‘Princess’ and she’d let him buy her for the afternoon. She’d be as hard as nails for him. Or else they’d make imagination manifest: ‘Let’s sit apart and masturbate.’ Or else, ‘Let’s buy some honey, Dip. We’ll put it on and lick it off. I’ll put some on my breasts and you can feed off me …’ Or else, ‘Do you want to do me in my hat? I’ll do a show for you. You toss-and-pitch and watch. For every coin that you land inside the brim I’ll take something off.’

Once, when she had watched Dip lifting purses from the smarter ladies of the town, she asked, ‘Why don’t you try to burgle me?’: ‘Just like we’re in a crowd,’ she said. ‘You come up and dip your hands inside my clothes and try to find my purse.’ For Aunt the narrative of sex, the scene, the characters, were seldom twice the same. Her passions were theatrical. She cast herself in parts in which the heroine was more slender and had better skin than her, in which she was in charge, desired, insatiable, amused, in which she could transcend herself, become any one of those grand or glamorous women on the street.

The Princesses were wrong. Hilarity was not the word, though laughter was a part of sexual pleasure. Euphoria was what she felt. When she and Dip were making, staging love, it seemed the real world could be kept at bay. She could have kept the world at bay all day! What was the hurry? What was the point in hurtling, like men, through such sustainable pleasures to the brief and unreliable moment when the bubble shudders, bursts? She could not understand how Dip, at breakfast time, was so easily, so speedily, so undramatically relieved. That was his word, ‘Relief’ — ‘Give me relief,’ he said. For Aunt not-making-love was not the absence of relief, but a muting of that part of her which found its best expression in the gift of love.

They’d put ‘the kid’ to sleep when they’d first met and kissed. Of course, tired and dispirited though he was, he did not sleep for ever. For Aunt and Dip to live the life they chose, to play such parts each afternoon, to spend those hours drinking glee, they needed privacy, the privacy of two, not three, bananas to the bunch. A child of Victor’s age was old enough to inhibit anything beyond a kiss. Both Aunt and Dip had understood, the day they met, that if their passion for each other was to boil and whistle like a kettle and not steam and simmer like the water in an open pot, they would require time to themselves.

‘We’ll put the boy to work,’ Dip said, when he had suffered inhibitions for long enough. ‘He’s missing his mum and this’ll give him something else to do.’

What kind of work? Aunt raised an eyebrow almost to her cloche’s brim.

‘The boy can hardly walk,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have him begging on his own. Besides, he’s just a baby, though he’s big. He’s hardly weaned … He isn’t bright enough. He isn’t tough …’

‘I’ll fix him up,’ said Dip. ‘The streets are full of kids like him, and doing very nicely, too.’

‘But doing what?’

Dip hadn’t thought it out, but now he had to find a scheme and find it quickly, too, before he lost his patience with the boy and showed it with his fists. He settled for the first idea that came. The boy could build a future out of eggs.

‘What eggs?’ Aunt asked.

‘The eggs you steal from out the back of that big storehouse.’

‘Then what? You think he’ll build a nest and hatch them out?’

‘We’ll boil them up, what else?’

‘What else? It’s juggling that you have in mind, I guess. Or sulphur bombs.’

‘We’ll boil them up. Get the kid a little bag or tray, some twists of salt. He’ll have a business on his hands! When I was little, that was lunch at harvest time, or if we had to travel anywhere outside the village. One boiled egg. The only salt we had was sweat. My grandma used to tell our fortunes from the broken shell. The shell could show how long you’d live. Perhaps the kid can trade in fortunes, too.’

‘He’s hardly seven years of age.’

‘Seven’s an old man in this town.’

So it was that Victor first became a marketeer, a soapie at the age of seven. Aunt was his wholesaler. She crept into the storehouse from which she’d stolen — but more modestly — a dozen times before. It was late at night, after the fresh eggs had been brought from the railway station, sorted, placed in straw-lined trays. She lined a muslin bag with paper, lifted the one loose wallboard which provided access from the city lane at the rear of the building, and crept into the midnight room.

On that first night she was afraid. She’d stolen eggs before, but only one or two. A watchman, catching her, would not call on the police or his employer for what it took a hen a day to make. He’d settle for the lecture he could give or, at worst, demand some other recompense.

But on that night she wanted fifty eggs at least, more hen’s work than could be shrugged off as ‘breakages’. If she was caught and put away then Victor would be orphaned once again. She did not trust her Dip — left as a sentry in the street with Victor sleeping on his shoulder and her hat in hand — to give the boy a home or love. She’d never seen them touch affectionately. Dip was the sort who having never been a cared-for child himself thought touch and tenderness were simply trinkets with which men could flatter, soften, win their women. But Aunt — persuaded now against all reason that Victor would be happier left on his own, the boiled-egg salesman of the marketplace — had made herself the promise that he would ‘always have a beam above his head at night’. If she could guarantee that he was safe and warm at night, then she could put him out of mind by day.

She was the cheerful type. What was the point in brewing guilt? Who’d benefit if she and Victor caressed and hugged all day, and let their empty stomachs shrink and pucker in the cold? It seemed to her, as she gained entry to the storeroom, that stealing eggs for Victor was the greatest gift that she could give because these eggs would free Em’s son from her, and leave her free of him.

That night the storeroom was not entirely dark. A late winter moon turned the skylight windowpanes a liquid silver and made the room look colder than it was, as if the ceiling had been tiled in translucent squares of ice. What light there was picked out the thousand brittle, bony skulls of eggs. The shells absorbed the light, reflecting none onto their bedding straw, like button mushrooms butting into oxygen from earth.

Aunt walked as gently as fear allows between the egg trays and the light. The odour was strong, and reminiscent too. The chicken dung, the straw, the timber of the room, the salt-and-semen smell of white and yolk, the moonlight dressing, was farmyard simplified, was field. Aunt took just five eggs from each tray and — counting in a whisper as she worked — filled her bag with sixty eggs. They were the size and weight of perfect plums. The only sounds she heard were Dip whistling in the lane outside — his warning that there were passers-by — and, far away, the midnight alarums of the drunks and revellers amongst the final trams and scuffles of the night. There were no rats to alarm her. The watchman slept on undisturbed. But still she was afraid. The eggs were ghosts. They looked like souls or sins encased in sculpted skin. To steal these icy eggs at night made Aunt feel like a grave-robber. Each one was someone dead and someone loved. Which were her parents? Which were the villagers who’d been alive when Aunt was born? Which one was Em?

She could not move. Dip whistled without cease, suspiciously and tunelessly. Perhaps there were policemen on the street — then whistling would only bring ill-luck to Dip. But if he stopped?

Aunt crouched beside her bag of eggs. A moth flew up from God-knows-where. A bat-moth, black, grey, and red. It landed on the back of Aunt’s right hand. It closed its wings and rested on her warmth. No great weight, no manacle, could have rendered Aunt more still or breathless than that one moth. Then Victor woke. She heard Dip curse, then whistle once again — a slower, sleepy version of the dance he’d been attempting before. But Victor would not settle to this bogus lullaby. His thin crow voice was raised in protest at the pressure of Dip’s hold, the darkness of the lane, his orphanage. ‘Shut up,’ Dip said. But Victor knew the power of his lungs and screamed. Nothing would make him happy now. He was alone, at midnight, in the city. Tomorrow he would earn his living — a marketeer at last. But for the moment, but for ever, Em was dead, the eggs were stolen, packed, and Aunt was crouching in that brittle-mushroom field, transfixed. She was not certain what had pinned her there — the screaming or the whistling or the moth. She only knew what everybody knew who’d come from village into town, that midnight is a lonely and ungenerous time when streetlamps blanket out the stars.

She held the bat-moth by the wings and put it on the eggs. She had to take the chance of climbing back into the town. Victor’s screaming, Dip’s slow dance, were loud and strange enough to bring the army out. She lifted the loose wallboard and looked outside. It seemed safe enough. She clambered through the gap and reached back into the storeroom for the bag of eggs, and then replaced the board to disguise her entry. Dip had seen her now, and stopped whistling. Victor screamed. Despite the hour the lane was busy. Men, mostly alone, were making for a brothel-bar where drinks and women could be bought until dawn. They passed between the distraught child and the woman thief without a comment or a glance. Crime and distress were the common starlings of the street. They could not give a damn.

9

A COUNTRY CHILD of six or seven might work all day at harvest time. Hard work, too; helping with the stacks, or pulling roots, or climbing to the furthest branches for the remotest plums. At dawn it very often was the child who was sent out to slop the pigs or strip the maize for chicken feed. The youngest daughter had the milking stool. The smallest son was sent at dusk to gate the herd or flock, and if he came home empty-handed — that’s to say, he’d found no firewood, mushrooms, nuts — then very often supper was withheld. ‘Empty hands, empty stomach,’ was the village phrase. At lambing or when the fruit was in its fullest blush, some girl or boy would have to keep the foxes or the applejays at bay. All it took would be a fire, a scare-drum, or a horn. A single child in every orchard or each field throughout the day or night would do the job at no expense, so long as they were vigilant and did not sleep. Nobody said, That kid’s misused. How could you leave a child so young, alone, for such a time, with so much danger all around? Rather, their childhood seemed ennobled by the tasks they had. Work made them independent, healthy, spirited. Why, then, the fuss when city children worked? Compared to country kids the poorest city children — homeless, reckless on the streets — had an easy time of it. At least they pleased themselves. If they were bored with holding carriage horses for small change, or selling matches, papers, sex, then they could take the time to share a cigarette with friends or join the shoal of sprat-sized thieves and beggars in the Soap Garden. They could vie with pigeons for rinds of bread, or glean the market for discarded fruit, or splash around in the motherly and greying laundry water of the public washing fountain.

Philanthropists, of course, would do their best to net the shoal, to place the best and brightest of the girls in houses where they’d be taught to iron and make the beds. They’d do their best to separate the boys from their bad ways, their friends, their cigarettes, their threadbare clothes, by indenturing them to coachbuilders, factory men, or anybody wanting hard work for no pay. They thought a hostel was a better place for orphans than the street, yet could not answer why it was that once their orphans had a bed, a schedule for their prayers, once they had work and food, a change of clothes, they still broke loose to join the starlings again.

The answer’s tough and simple. It is this: that routes to misery and hell are often much more fun, more challenging than routes to virtue and well-being. Why else, how else, would children such as those who thronged the Soap Garden and the Market, then and now, embrace the destitution of the city streets with such audacity and such appetite? We should not grieve too much for little Victor, then. Not yet, at least. The market was a warm and busy place, more cheerful than a four-walled room, more sociable, more nourishing than the four dry, sweet breasts that had sustained him till the fire. He was bereaved, twice over. He was not strong. Or wise. But he was young enough to mistake mischance for the natural order of his life.

He sat, contented, resigned, before his tray of eggs, exactly in the place — where else? — where he had sat and suckled for so long with Em. His back was set against his mother’s tree. It was a home of sorts. And though his face was not well known (how could it be, pressed up against his mother’s flesh and shrouded, swaddled from the light?), he knew enough about the tricks of trade to turn his thin mouth up and advertise his wares with what appeared as undesigning smiles. Indeed he was amused. What boy, a few weeks short of seven years of age, would not delight in sixty eggs of which he had sole charge?

Aunt and Dip were his first customers, pretending to be casual passers-by. They dropped their coins in his hand and made the most of choosing a well-boiled egg. They smelled the shells. They tapped the shells and held the oval echo to their ears. They ate their eggs exactly where they stood, stooping down theatrically to help themselves to salt.

‘Sweet God, these eggs are good,’ they said, to anyone who caught their eye. ‘Go on. Buy one. This kid has got the cheapest breakfast place in town.’

Victor was glad to see the back of them. It left him free to turn their coins in his hand, to wet his finger for a plunge of salt, to stare into the ranks of eggs, to study all the cracks and stains that came from boiling them, to wait in vain for someone else to stoop and buy.

It was not until he left this home of sorts to wander on his weakly and untutored legs amongst the cafe tables and the market panniers that he began to sell. He did not even have to smile. He did not have to cry his wares. ‘Boiled eggs! Boiled eggs!’ was a less eloquent sales pitch than the silent, hardened eggs themselves. Besides, this was a marketplace. No need to state your business here. Display was all it took to do the trick. By late lunchtime, on that first trading day, the fifty-eight remaining eggs had been reduced to three. The salt was gone. Victor’s pockets hung like udders with the weight of cash. It was not much in value but volume matters more to kids than value. They much prefer the playfulness of coins to any paper note.

Victor ate the last three eggs himself. He was not skilled at taking off the shells, and had to spit the bony flakes onto the cobbles and flagstones of the Soap Market. He turned to make his way back to the garden, to wash his mouth out in the fountain water. But first he was seduced by the clanking, twig-thin man who sold fruit juices out of spouted cans and called out what was seasonal: ‘Berries, honey gourds, oranges. Fresh juice. Fresh juice.’ Victor pointed at a spouted can. He could not tell what juice it held. The hawker rinsed a glass with water from a skin. He shook the glass dry and clean. With practised shrugs he tilted the can and filled the glass with bluish berry juice. He took a coin out of Victor’s hand. Victor stood, struck motionless. He was rejoicing in the simple algebra of buy-and-sell which had so quickly and so effortlessly transformed his boiled eggs into juice.

The street kids did their best, with threats and brittle charm, to make Victor one of them. They had their gangs. The Moths. The Dross. The Market Boys. The Fly-by-Nights. If Victor meant to limp with his burden of eggs between the market pitches or sell them to the cafe customers in the Soap Garden, then he at least should make his peace with those tough boys and girls who were the gangland chieftains or their generals. They seemed so competent at everything from marbles to manslaughter that, surely, they were the natural allies of any child out on the streets alone. But Victor had been buried for too long. He did not understand the courtesies of life amongst the pack. He did not wish to speak with his contemporaries, or take on board relationships which were not trading ones, which were not serious, which did not earn. These were the sort of boys who made their cash like tough old men, and blued it all on sweets, and toys, and cigarettes, not eggs. Victor thought these urchins far too trivial.

At first these gangsters — that’s the word — just circled him and nudged as if he were a goldfish in a tank of orfe. They helped themselves to eggs and pelted him with what they couldn’t eat. They kicked his shins. They found a name for him. They taunted him with ‘Vic the Prick’, or called him Goose because he walked unsteadily, and had a lot of eggs. They said he had to join the gang, or pay, or leave the marketplace, or else. Or else? They pressed their fists into his face. They burned his wrist with Chinese twists. They knocked his tray so that his eggs cracked on the cobblestones. They meant to illustrate what else might happen to a boy, alone, who did not court the approbation of the gang.

Victor did not understand what blows or twisted arms or threats with fists and knives were meant to signify. Their language was not his. What did their violence mean? He only understood that there was chaos on the streets more urgent than the protocol of gangs. Each day had its uncertainties: that it might rain. That nobody would want to dine on eggs that day. That there might be some pointless kindness from a marketeer who’d give away a damaged pear, or pay for eggs with too much cash and not require the change. That there’d be holidays when no one came — the market would be closed, the cafes shuttered, the cobbles and the sky laid close and listless, like sheet and mattress on an empty bed. He took it all. His job was selling on the streets. The eggs passed through his hands like worry beads. No Chinese burn, no punch, could deflect his armoured single-mindedness. He did not understand the power of cash yet. He was content that when he went back to Dip’s room at night his pockets were turned out and all the change removed as ‘payment for tomorrow’s eggs’. He had to learn a stranger and a tougher algebra of trade than the one which fed him berry juice — that is that all his patience and hard work upon the street could be so quickly and so effortlessly transformed into beer and other treats for Aunt and Dip. He was the middleman, the trading lime — and he was being squeezed.

Of course, Aunt no longer crept at night into the storeroom to steal the eggs for Victor. It had only taken three days for the packing foreman to observe that random eggs had disappeared, and that they disappeared at night.

‘You think they’re hatching into bats?’ he asked. ‘Or are we being robbed?’

He and the watchman found the loosened board and set a trap. They sat on stools behind the entry board with sticks upon their laps. They shared a bottle of aqua vitae, and suppered silently on pork and bread. One dozed while one kept watch.

At midnight Aunt arrived, a little slowed and fortified by drink. She had no appetite for foraging amongst the oval ghosts. But it was easy money, and Dip was far too tall and dandified to forage for himself. They’d been amazed how much their little Vic had earned on his first day. He’d made enough to win himself not-quite-a-hug from Dip. It was not enough to buy good clothes or meals in restaurants. There was enough, though, turned out from his trouser pockets (the country phrase, again), ‘to oil their throats and grease their bums’.

Aunt was too hurried to remove her hat. Her battered cloche, much loved, cleaved to her head as tightly as an acorn cup. Dip signalled that the lane was clear. Aunt freed the loose board with her foot and pushed her hat and head straight through the gap. The packing foreman, full of self-esteem and pork, woke up in time to see the watchman’s stick make contact with the straw. Aunt’s hat fell off, but — good friend that it was — it broke the blow. Her head went back into the town. She tore her chin on wood. She stood. She ran. Though she could have just as safely strolled away. The loose board was too narrow. The foreman and the watchman were twice Aunt’s size and had to satisfy themselves with that one battered trophy, that old straw cloche, that disembodied gaiety.

What should Dip and Aunt do now? What could they steal? Where were there eggs to boil for the next day’s trade? Aunt took the money that Victor had brought home. She did her sums, and showed Dip how it worked with matchsticks spread out on the floor. They’d buy the eggs from a poultryman like blameless citizens for such-and-such each egg. Cheap eggs perhaps, not fresh exactly, but not green either. They’d boil them up, and despatch Victor to sell them in the marketplace for such-and-such and such again. Ten matches spent earned fifteen matches back. And fifteen matches made more than twenty-two. It was safe and legal — and lucrative, so long as eggs were à la mode. If only Aunt could recover her old hat or buy another one, the pair of them would be content again.

So it nearly was. At first they provided and prepared the eggs, and Victor sold them on the streets. But soon they were too bored with boiling them, four at a time, in their one pot. They said to Victor, ‘It’s your job.’ And so he got them from the poultryman himself. He learnt to count the money out and pay. He begged for charcoal or found wood to feed the stove in Dip’s one room. He boiled the eggs himself, and took more care than Aunt or Dip had ever done to keep the shells intact and clean. They shared the profits, but he kept his merchandise well out of sight. They hardly spoke. They hardly met. When Dip and Aunt came back at night, Victor was curled up with stomach pain and sleep. The eggs he ate each day had made him constipated. His guts were pumped up with wind. They were as hard and bilious as sated snakes. His farts were counter-tenor monotones, as noisy and as regular as chimes. This was the fiercest smell. But there were others too — the eerie odours that the eggs released when they were boiled, the badger-pungency of souring, broken eggs, the mawkishness of shells. The three of them had sulphur nightmares, sulphur in their clothes, brimstone breath. They might as well have slept on Etna or inside the crater of some soufrière, decapitated like a breakfast egg. The smell was sweet and hot and aggravating. Victor’s guts whined like unpunctured sausages in coals. Aunt did not snore, but puffed and hummed all night as if she did not dare to taint her lungs with inward breaths of air.

Dip hardly slept. He stayed out on the streets all night. He longed to push his hands in strangers’ pockets once again. He had no appetite for sex with Aunt, or drink with Aunt, or hatless Aunt. One evening he did not return. He’d make his fortunes in some other part of town. Then Aunt — her judgement blurred by reckless loneliness — found some other man. Her sister’s boy? She left him with her baggage, unattended, in what had been Dip’s room and now was his. These were the first days of a life alone.

When Victor was eighty he could not recall his mother’s face, or Aunt’s, or Dip’s. He could recall the parasol, the broad-brimmed cloche, the patent shoes, the collar studs. He could recall the painted cart piled high with greens and melons which Em had promised would one day take him and her out to the city edges where the trees began. He could recall his father’s greying candle stub.

He did not talk about these things — though the bricks and cobbles of the town and marketplace stored all his early life like walls store moss, and the osmotic gossips of the city had taken in his life and passed it on to anyone with time to spare. Victor himself, when he grew to be a man of consequence, had just one public story from those days of poverty and waifing eggs. It was the story that he told when he could not escape the duties of the business millionaire and was called upon to make a speech to the Commerce Club or talk to someone from the radio or the financial press, or write a foreword for the little magazine his staff produced.

They knew he started life with eggs. But then? What was it drove him onwards, up and out of eggs, apart from cramp and flatulence? How was it that a boy so young could have the vision to diversify from eggs to eggs and fruit and bread and cheese, to upgrade his tray with decoration, then with wheels until he traded off a barrow? Where did he find the energy, the business zeal, to strip his barrow when the trading day was done and hire out himself and it for bringing produce cheaply from the station, until he had two barrows, five, and twenty-five, and ten boys in his pay, and fruit stalls of his own, and packing firms and farms, and, finally, before his fortieth year, the Soap Market itself?

Why not stop when he was crowned the Fruit King of the city? Why battle on to set up import/export firms, and trucking companies, and canneries, to build Big Vic, to spread his fortune round the city and the world so that each lemon squeezed for tea by anyone in town would have been packeted as seed, and grown in soil, and harvested in plantations, and sent in trucks and trains and boats, and invoiced out of offices, and sold on market stalls that Victor owned?

‘You tend your tree. You get good fruit,’ he used to say. Or, ‘I was born a countryman — and country people always reinvest their seed.’ These were both phrases he had taken from his man called Rook. But that single story from his past was not Rook’s work. It was Victor’s own: one evening — he was nine or ten, Aunt and Dip were gone, and he was still surviving on boiled eggs — he ended up as usual in the cafes and the bars of the Soap Garden. Boiled eggs went well with mugs of beer — but he had learnt there was no point in offering boiled eggs to those who drank the favoured clay-red wine or ordered coffee. Malt and eggs do not do battle in the mouth — but eggs with coffee or with wine destroy the taste and smell of both.

There was a man who nearly always bought three eggs and ate them, without pause, whether he was drinking beer or wine or coffee-and-a-shot. He paid a little extra to have his eggs unshelled by Victor. He did not take a plunge of salt. He dipped his eggs instead into the sugar pot. He halved each egg longways with his teeth and then consumed each half open-mouthed and without much regard for the spectacle and mess he made. It was not clear what kind of man he was. He sat alone, though everyone who served or passed by deferred to him. He was so fat that he walked with a stick, not because he lacked the strength to bear his weight, but simply as a means of maintaining lift and balance should he need to sit or climb a stair, or — rarity indeed — to step aside. His walking stick was tarbony and topped in silver, not ostentatious but smart, and as sturdy as a cudgel. The scroll etching in the silver was made bold in its recesses by city grubbiness and verdigris and — who could doubt it? — dried blood.

They said he was a landlord of some sort, a pimp, a man who’d been a consul in the tropics and had made a fortune out of gold or slaves or running guns, an impresario, a counterfeiter, an operatic star who had not sung since some scandal or some love affair had silenced him, an undercover cop. He hardly ever spoke a word. He took his usual seat, at the margins of the nearest cafe. It was a seat which did not require him to negotiate the narrow spaces between tables, chairs, and customers. He drank his drinks. He ate his eggs. He read his paper or his magazine. He made a note, occasionally, inside a grey-bound book. He held his stick as if he were a shepherd eager for the chance to drive away a raven or a dog. He staved off fullness with excess.

‘We never knew his name, or what he did,’ said Victor. ‘The only certainty about this man was that he was worthy of respect.’

So Victor was fastidious. He made certain that the eggs he sold to him were fresh and free of shell, and clean. He placed the three shelled eggs, as usual, on the metal bill-and-tip which the waiter had positioned next to — that balmy night — a glass of beer, and waited for his payment in small change. There was always a wait. A fat man finds it difficult to fish his purse or coins from his trousers or his coat. His right hand was trapped inside his pocket when someone knocked him from behind. The table shuddered. And the beer? It spilled a little and would have fallen from the table had not the fat man, with the speed and delicacy of a lizard’s tongue, shot out his one free hand and steadied it. He turned as best he could. His body did not turn, just his head and neck. His chair and back received another blow and this time the beer and glass were on the ground before his hand could move. The eggs began to slide and arc across the tabletop, their passage eased and oiled by beer. They jostled at the table’s edge like nervous bubbles at a drain, fell off, and then were split and knocked as tasteless as the cobblestones.

The fat man did not feel the third impulse. Two fighting men, one pushing with stiff fingers and a spittled mouth, another walking backwards and attempting to defend himself with kicks, sent the table spinning on one leg, then sprawling, legs aloft, above the eggs and beer. So far as one could tell from the stream of threats and imprecations they exchanged, their differences would not be solved without the death of one.

They were two market traders, partners, neighbours, old-time friends — and what they’d fallen out about wasn’t worth a bead of phlegm, let alone the lungfuls that the two of them, now out of fighting range, were looping at each other through the air.

The younger of the two had wisecracked with the customers of the older man, the one whose fighting fingers were so certain and so stiff. He’d teased them, half cunningly and half in jest, that his neighbour’s produce was not fresh.

‘He’s selling fossils and antiques today,’ he’d said. The neighbour swore this foolishness, these lies, had cost him trade. And more. And worse. He knew for sure that, while his back was turned, the younger one pocketed the cash for onion clumps which they had purchased as partners and whose profits they should share. He did not listen to his friend’s defence — that ‘while my back was turned’ meant ‘while I filled myself with drink, while I let the business, onion clumps and all, slide into hell’. There were a hundred other microscopic aggravations between the men that, in the sudden heat of anger, seethed and thrived like viruses. ‘Go dine on shit,’ one said. The other held his little finger up, a gesture meant to show disdain, and said, with feeble dignity, ‘I’ll never talk to you again.’

The fat man filled his lungs and put some pressure on his stick. His knuckles whitened. It looked as if he were about to show how he could slay these two with just one etched and silver blow. But he was only holding tight so that he could stand. Once up — and once the two adversaries had quietened and were watching him — he dipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a wallet. He took out one banknote. He unfolded it and held it up, theatrically, for all to see. A blue five-thousand note. A two-month wage. Enough to purchase a good horse, enough to buy a thousand eggs. The fat man folded the blue note in two, lengthways, exactly as he halved his eggs, and tore it carefully along the crease. What was he then? A conjurer? Would he set fire to those two halves, or chew them up, then make them whole again? Was this a good note? Was it counterfeit?

There was no movement in the Soap Garden. Even waiters, trays aloft, were frozen where they stood. Victor was not the only one who’d never seen a note as large as that before. What kind of man would tear such wealth in two?

The fat man flung out and spread his arms, a half-note in each hand. His voice was both bourgeois and everyday. It was, surprisingly, for one so large, a little reedy too.

‘One each,’ he said. He shook the worthless halves impatiently. ‘Come on. Step up.’

The younger man was the first to step forward. He did not look the fat man in the eye. He concentrated on the half-a-fortune and the walking stick, expecting there to be some finger trick or some low, crippling blow. He need not have feared. The stiff, blue piece of paper transferred to him with just the slightest reticence where the embossed printing snagged on the fat man’s dampened skin.

The elder of the two was also reticent. He recognized the fat man’s game. He had children of his own and knew how squabbles were resolved by parental trickery. You broke a ginger stick in half and let the children suck away their moods. Yet half a ginger stick had value on its own. It tasted just as good in pieces. But half a note? He could not formulate exactly what the trick might be, yet he was in no doubt, as he took in the fat man and his neighbour holding half a fortune in their hands, that he would be a fool to walk away. He might as well take half a note. To turn away would not look good or wise. Pride would not allow a market man to jeopardize just half a chance of making random, unearned cash.

He did not move. He put his hand out. Palm up. The cussed supplicant. Let Mammon come to him. The fat man was not proud. He did not mind that he would have to move a pace or two. He took three steps. He spread his weight across both legs and leant his stick against a chair. He rolled the half note in a ball, dismissively, with studied irony. He dropped it on the outstretched, flattened palm. And then he took the market trader’s hand in both of his and wrapped the fingers round the paper ball.

‘Now talk,’ the fat man said.

Both traders felt more foolish than they’d done since they were adolescents. They did not hang around. They did not walk away, of course, arms linked, their two half lives already interlocked. They disappeared like cats, their heads and shoulders down, their ears alert, their fur on end. They would not talk that night — but who can doubt that they would trade weak grins the following day and then handshakes? They’d see the sense in being partners once again.

The fat man did not watch them go. He waited for a moment, on his stick, while three waiters put the chairs and table back in place, wiped up the beer, removed the mushy eggs. The proprietor himself brought out a replacement beer, the best. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said, thankful for the damage and the mayhem that the blue note had thwarted and thankful, too, for all the rich absurdities which they had witnessed.

The fat man started on his beer, as unbothered, it would seem, by the spat which he had ended as by the money he had lost. The no-expression on his face said, Five thousand? That’s a morsel for a man like me. I’d throw a hundred of them to the wind just so long as I can have my beer and eggs in peace and quiet. He looked up, then. The thought of eggs had made him lift his eyes and run his baby tongue along his lips.

Victor was standing where he always stood. Hypnotized. The fat man held three fingers up. Victor selected three more eggs. He cracked their shells at their thick ends and peeled them white and bare. He brought the sugar from another table. He stood and took the coins from the fat man’s hand. He hoped that he would tear a note in half for him as well. He was not old enough to fully understand what he had witnessed: the fickle, slender contrivances, the artifices, the stratagems of wealth, its piety, its fraudulence, its crude finesse. But — given time — he’d understand it all and make a scripture out of it.

‘The fat man taught me,’ Victor explained, to those who wished to hear or read the complex moral of his anecdote, ‘that money talks.’ He did not know that such an insight was old hat and crassly simple. Or that his variations of this insight — such as ‘Money is the peacemaker’ and ‘Money’s muscle’ — were simple complications of the truth. What the fat man had displayed was cynicism, if cynicism is the trick of seeming to engage with chance and danger but without taking any risks. Money has no moral tact. It’s true, the rich have power to intervene, to heal and damage as they wish. Toss money in the ring and see the drama that it makes of other people’s lives. But, more, they have the power, if they choose, to stay more silent and discrete than monks. The rich — and here was Victor’s unacknowledged dream — can simply make a wall, a fortress shield of wealth, beyond which the dramas of the world can run their courses unobserved.

Victor so far — he was nine or ten — had led a life not free of drama of the tragic kind. The misfortune of his father’s death. The journey into town. The nights beneath the parasol. The fire. The days with Aunt and Dip. The liberation and the tyranny of eggs. His was a moral tale, an exemplar of how miserably the small fry of the world can fare. Someone could write a book on his first years and make it stand for all our city’s woes. No wonder, then, that Victor now wished for something more mundane than poverty. He wished to be a fat man, too, protected from the city by what his wallet held. In this, he sought what Joseph, decades later, sought. And that was privacy. He saw himself, an older, wealthy man, alone and dining in a public place. At times it was a city restaurant, at other times a trestle in the countryside, with chickens and with trees. There was no noise, except the sound of cutlery on plates. He was quite calm and unafraid. No one around was close enough to disappoint him or betray him. A waiter, paid to do his job, was all he needed. He did not need or want a family, or friends. He did not need the warmth of company or conversation, or the reassurances of praise. No one could come and give him Chinese burns. No one could let him down or disappear. There was no comfort which could not be bought. There was no problem that he could not solve by tearing notes in half. What is more eloquent and reassuring than a shield of private wealth?

So Victor now — and almost by design — became an undramatic boy. He had his room, his job, his street routines. He had ambition, too, but nothing to make good grand opera from. He set his sights painstakingly on targets within reach — more sales of eggs, a market stall, an orchard and a field, a motorvan, some staff, some ledgers and a desk … He told himself that when he was more safe and certain, he would test the magic of the torn banknote. Not five thousand, naturally. He was the timid sort. A hundred note, perhaps. But that day never came, despite the money that he made. Because he never felt that he was safe or certain? Because he was mean and unadventurous? That was the judgement of the town. No one expected such a man — and so late in life — to lower his defences for a while and toss his money in the ring.